Tutorial
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Skeletal Animation Sprites
This tutorial is a very simple one designed to introduce you to the skeletal animation sprite capabilities of GameMaker: Studio. Generally all sprites in GameMaker use bitmaps
which, while flexible in terms of content, place limitations on both the size and number of frames possible in a sprite before memory usage can become prohibitive. Skeletal animation removes some of these limitations
and also has the benefit of permitting much smoother animations, "tweening" between animation sets, skins, and attachments. Don't worry if you aren't sure about what each of those things means, as we will be
explaining them all during the tutorial.
The sprites that GameMaker: Studio supports are those made in the program Spine (you can get a trial copy here
if you don't already own it).
This tutorial assumes that you already have a working knowledge of the core concepts behind Spine and will not cover anything in that program that is not relevant to GameMaker and the functions
described. At various points in this tutorial you will be directed towards the "Skeletal Animation Assets" folder. It can be found in this folder and
you should have it open and ready as we will need a few things from it for our game.
It is worth noting that this tutorial assumes a basic knowledge of GML (the GameMaker Language), as well as a good working knowledge of the IDE and how to do basic tasks like load a sprite or
create an event and add actions.
NOTE: If you can't see some of the images in this tutorial correctly, or they seem too small, you can expand the tutorial pane by dragging the left window border into the IDE.
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