We’re creating Alchemist, a procedural 2D animation and content creation expansion suite for our upcoming animation software, Spriter 2. You can get both Spriter 2 and Alchemist via this Kickstarter.
Spriter 2 itself will handle all the core features you’ll need for setting up characters, objects, and entire scenes and manually animating them.
Here’s a quick teaser video for Spriter 2 if you’re not already familiar:
and here’s how Alchemist will enhance the creative possibilities:
Alchemist will add to Spriter 2’s flexible and intuitive user interface and workflow to further increase your rigging and animation options. When you animate your character turning their head, or blinking, or anything else, you can tie these actions to control widgets of the type and position of your choosing (with customizable constraints).
These widgets will be part of the inheritance hierarchy, so they will be able to affect each other in whatever way you define.
Once you set up your animations and controls, you’ll be able to pose your character more like an action figure or armature than a traditional 2d rigged character.
During Spriter 2 and Alchemist’s development, there was a big emphasis on making sure that artists feel completely free to animate in whatever way they want. You’ll be able to effortlessly switch from drawing and frame by frame animation, to deforming and tweening, to posing with bones, to posing using strokes – and basically never be stuck with rigid limitations to how you animate because of how you had initially set up your character.
You’ll be able to import and use layered PSD files as though they are a single texture or as a fully assembled layered object.
And mesh deformation is hierarchical, meaning deformation meshes can be children of each other to help you easily achieve natural-looking animation, even for very detailed and complex characters.
But the real power Alchemist will bring you is its suite of procedural tools, which will allow you to have your characters and objects animate and behave differently depending on the context:
With Alchemist you’ll be able to set up your characters to automatically blend between multiple animations to reflect temporary states like mood, movement speed, physical state, etc, or more permanent states like gender, age, physical condition, and personality.
You’ll be able to tell Alchemist to create procedurally generated characters or crowds by choosing values for your predefined attributes, which will, in turn, define your characters’ animations, choose appropriate accessory objects, and select or cross-fade between predefined textures and meshes.
Alchemist will allow you to override and manually customize any of this for specific characters.
You will even be able to leverage these features into a character customization system for your game.
You will also be able to define probabilities for all of these properties in order to generate random characters and NPCs, each with their own visual style and animations appropriate to their unique attributes.
In addition to the manual controls we discussed earlier, you can use the relationships between objects and entities to automatically control aspects of your characters, animations, and interactions.
These are flexible tools you can use in endless ways. Here are a few examples.
There will be a variety of trigger types like random probability triggers, threshold triggers for when a specific value is crossed, area triggers, and several more we’ll discuss in the next section
These can trigger any internal Spriter 2 action, like playing or pausing an animation, changing an animation state or value, toggling the visibility of an object, changing character maps, or spawning and destroying entities such as sparks, dust clouds, fireballs, bullets, or entire other characters.
Here are some examples of what you could do when you combine that with the features we’ve already mentioned:
In addition to games, this can be used to more quickly animate a cartoon series, by allowing you to have lively low maintenance background characters, or giving you strong baseline behavior and reactions to manually build upon.
Here’s a more complex gameplay example: An entire town’s collective mood can be shifted by an accumulation of individual events, which in turn affects the probability range of moods for generated NPCs, which would reflect not only in their animations but whether they are more likely to be hostile, open to trade, etc
You will also have the ability to map deformation grids over your hand-drawn 2d environment, allowing you to define your own stylized perspective rules. Capture the charm and looseness of imperfect handcrafted movement within a scene, but with the ease and immediacy you’d expect from a traditional overhead 2d game. You could even animate your deformation grids to create dramatic cartoon camera motion and effects.
And finally, with Alchemist’s user input and interactivity features you’ll be able to:
And you can preview your creations right in the editor, and then load them into your favorite game engine for direct publishing or as a part of a larger game.
Please make sure you pick a tier for someone who already owns Spriter. As a thank you for backing us in 2012, if you back the Alchemist for Spriter owners tier ($35), you will automatically get the new Game Effects Art Pack, and if you back the Alchemist Pre-order & Game Effects Pack tier ($50), you will automatically get all future art packs.
If you back this tier you can also get Spriter Pro upon request after the successful completion and payment processing of this campaign.
If you back this tier you can also get Spriter Pro upon request after the successful completion and payment processing of this campaign.
If you back this tier you can also get Spriter Pro upon request after the successful completion and payment processing of this campaign.
If you back this tier you can also get Spriter Pro upon request after the successful completion and payment processing of this campaign.
From near day one of the first full release there will be full runtimes for C# and Unity. Updates to these runtimes will be released along with new builds of Spriter 2 whenever new features are introduced. In addition to Unity and C#, the primary APIs and plugins we’ll focus on are C++, JavaScript, Unreal, and Construct 3. Beyond that, we plan to work with expert developers for any other platform as much as possible to ensure the best Spriter 2 and Alchemist support possible, as soon as possible. Because there are so many unpredictable factors, we can’t give ETAs on any particular runtime yet.
We have to stay focused on the Windows version until the first full release. After that, we plan to support the current version of MacOS, and the Linux distribution officially supported by Steam at the time of initial release. Features will always be developed on the Windows version first, so there will be more frequent beta releases on Windows between full updates available on all OS’s.
As with the original Spriter Pro, we’ll be creating a series of first-party animated Art Packs that you can you use with Spriter 2. You can use these as-is in your own games and animations, and more importantly, you can edit or replace the images and use Spriter 2’s wide range of features to completely change or customize the art and animations to suit your own needs and style.
These new art packs will be made to a very high visual and animation standard, putting full use to Spriter 2’s advanced features such as mesh-deforming and will offer a high level of customization options for the characters and objects by swapping out pre-created alternate image sets and other advanced character map features.
We’ll be releasing two versions of each Art Pack – the standard version for use in Spriter 2, and a premium Alchemist Enhanced version set up to take full advantage of all of Alchemist’s enhanced and procedural features. These art packs will have pre-configured animation blends, animation sequencing, transitions, procedural particle generation features, tweakable parameters to customize and mix animations, etc.
The first Art Pack will be the Game Effects Pack, whose standard version we hope to release soon after the release of Spriter 2 v. 1.0, and the Alchemist enhanced version around the release of Alchemist 1.0.
Each art pack will take between several months and a year to complete, depending on the complexity required. We might be able to start producing them in tandem after the Game Effects Pack is finished, but can’t guarantee this. Other planned art packs are:
Side-Scrolling Platformer: with fully animated player characters, enemies, bosses, pick-ups, and more.
Run N Gun Platformer: with fully animated player characters who can aim a weapon or arm-cannon in 8 directions (or more), enemies, bosses, pick-ups, and more.
Side-Scrolling Medieval Combat: with fully animated player characters with many animations for attacks, parries, defensive maneuvers, etc for several weapon and shield options. The pack will also include several enemies, bosses, pick-ups, and more.
and more to be announced at a later date…
Spriter 2 and Alchemist are products that will continue to generate revenue throughout their long lives. For this reason, the stretch goal features shown in the video and listed below are not necessarily dependent on this Kickstarter campaign, but if these funding stretch goals are met, the secured funding will enable us to focus on and develop these features much more quickly, possibly even in tandem with each other.
Drawing and painting tools within Alchemist. Switch freely back and forth between frame by frame and tweening/mesh deform style animation. You will have multiple layers to draw on, and you can mark any layer as non-exporting so you can leave yourself notes, import video and images into these layers for reference and rotoscoping, or leave feedback for other team members. You can also use these for storyboarding and animatics. In addition, you can export your drawing to a layered PSD for editing in your favorite external tools.
Full pixel art support in the way of a pixel-perfect camera, and expanding the drawing and painting tools of the previous tier to make pixel art more fun and easy. In addition to precise pixel-perfect drawing tools, we would add a RotSprite-like rotation algorithm to make creating exquisite pixels for frame by frame animations even easier.
Full shader support with a collection of common shader types ready to use in the editor for your cartoons, along with implementation support for equivalent shaders for use in your games. Bump maps, normal maps, and refraction effects. Animate shader values like any other Alchemist value. Also, we will commission a powerful clipping mask shader for things like eyes and advanced artist-driven shading.
The ability to create free-hand surreal perspective grids which will control the scale, angle, and any other attributes of any object that you position or move along the grid. You can set how Alchemist will tweak an object or character’s size, angle, or any value you wish as it moves along the perspective grid. Swap out characters for far distance renders, or tweak faked angles tied to custom controls, and even animate the grid to create super stylish cartoon camera effects. Eventually, you will be able to set distortion parameters along the grid to warp your camera for even more extreme stylized perspective views.
Support for creating custom text in Alchemist. This includes easy sprite-font creation with tools for texturing and outlining, as well as all the usual Alchemist features to warp or animate your text, move your text along a curve, etc. These features will work in Alchemist implementations as well, so you can have lively animated text in your games.
Special hierarchies will be introduced into Alchemist to allow for UI layout relationships like anchors and stretching. You will already be able to create interactive Uis in Alchemist before this tier, but this will make it easy to create more sophisticated UIs with easy to use rules for what should happen when your game window changes or across multiple screen sizes. As a separate part of this tier, we will expand the custom controls of Alchemist to allow you to further customize your character controllers with your own images and animations. For example instead of having a slider from “happy” to “sad”, you could replace the words with your own emojis, and decorate any part of your character control system with drawings, or additional buttons and internal logic, using the same interplay system you’ll use for game logic in Alchemist.
The ability to create and manage entire game levels and other complex scenes, with more advanced features for controlling cameras, triggering level and scene-based events, animations and other changes based on all sorts of things such as time, collisions, proximity, etc. Added support for multiple scenes and larger levels and scenes, as well as an additional UI mode to make creating scenes more easy and fun. Preview your scene, and pause it in the middle of playtesting to tweak platform heights, enemy positions, or level flow, etc. We will also add a new type of advanced intelligent sprite tiling to allow you to make complex or organic shapes that swap and tweak sprites based on their location within your deformed shape. This would be sort of like a free-form deformable more advanced version of a 9-patch.
Support for loading, displaying, and moving 3d models in your scene. This will include lighting features, additional UI modes for easier 3d scene management, as well as special hierarchies for your 2d characters so their drawings and animations will swap and blend appropriately for the view of the camera.
We’ve started small experiments with AI that have yielded promising results. We were severely limited by our access to powerful AI hardware, and this stretch goal would free us to try all types of amazing things.
For example, we were attempting to create an AI that can color your sketches for you. Due to our hardware limitations, we could only attempt this on tiny 128×128 images, but we had extremely encouraging results, nonetheless. Below the AI had only the left image to work with, with a small number of color hints (colored pixels in the sketch), and the right image is the result of the AI attempting to colorize the image based on those hints.
Aside from colorization, we could experiment with all types of interesting things, like automatic in-betweening of frame by frame animations, automatic inking, automatic shading and texturing, etc. This tier would be to enable us to start running AI experiments in the background constantly during Alchemist development. Any successful results will make it into Alchemist’s feature-set. We can’t guarantee what results we will be able to get, but it already looks promising and the journey will be awesome for all of us.
In addition, due to the availability of off the shelf solutions, with this stretch goal, head and face tracking to control your character would definitely be achieved.
BrashMonkey is a 2 man team comprised of one professional game artist and one programmer. This requires each of us to wear many hats to handle not just the development of Spriter 2, Alchemist, and Animated Art Packs, but also for all aspects of customer service, infrastructure, marketing, and general business management.
While Spriter Pro and now pre-orders of Spriter 2 generate revenue, the amount can vary wildly from month to month, depending on everything from market fluctuations and consumer whims to the whims of algorithms on marketplaces like Steam. Months of lower income require us to wear our less productive hats (like marketing) more of the time, slowing actual development.
A successful Kickstarter would provide a steady and stable runway to ensure we can not only focus full-time energy on actual production, but also contract additional programming manpower to deliver everything sooner than would otherwise be possible.
With the help of backers like you, the original Spriter was Kickstarted back in 2012. It played a huge roll in making modular animation available to and even commonplace for independent game developers, and since then it’s been used in countless successful games, indie projects, animations, and mod pipelines.
After 4 years of designing, prototyping, and testing, the foundation for Spriter 2 and Alchemist are complete, and we released an early alpha of Spriter 2.
Spriter 2’s beta is coming soon, the procedural API for Alchemist is ready, and all the basic interlocking parts required are complete. We just need to assemble the parts into complete features and finish creating their UI elements, and that’s where you come in! We need your help to continue the development of Alchemist full-time and bring on additional help where appropriate to get it out sooner.
If you already own Spriter or you’re a backer of our original Kickstarter we have special discounted tiers just for you. (see above – backer tier options section)
And while this campaign isn’t to fund Spriter 2 itself, if you haven’t already pre-ordered Spriter 2, this is a great chance to get it cheap on its own or bundled with Alchemist.
Whether or not you can back us at this time, you can help us a lot by sharing this campaign on social media.
We’re very excited to get Alchemist into your hands and we can’t wait to see what you create!
With the development of complex software the greatest risk is delay. We have done our best to mitigate this by getting a huge head start on the API to ensure we have a thorough understanding of what’s needed to complete each component. Funding from this campaign would allow for much more time and manpower to be dedicated on a full time basis to ensure the most efficient development process possible.