Novice animation software?

I've just been screwing around with Construct 2 up until now,and I do have skills in drawing, but turns out construct's animation stuff won't really cut it for the game I want to make. The thing is, there's a ton of Animation software out there, and if possible I'd like to start getting familiar with a single program ASAP, but which is the question. Basely speaking, my game will be an RPG platformer with open world elements. I plan on running it from TideSDK or something which comes with the game, so you won't need chrome to run it, or at least that's the plan. :)

I personally love Spriter. http://brashmonkey.com/

i'm using Spriter aswell. Maybie u could try out ShoeBox or Pro Motion(commercial) too.

There's no novice animation program , pick one , stick with it ...

Novice animation software? Use the one in Game Maker's image editor. That's what I've always used. It's the best I've found so far. Easy, useful, and has a lot of things to make sprites look better. :)

Edit: I would suggest using it with Spriter. Spriter seems to open up a lot of doors to ANIMATION where you have to separately edit each frame of an animation in Game Maker. If you're wanting to make good looking sprites it's still useful though. And so is the one inside PixieEngine. I tend to go on there often and make some really cool sprites just for the heck of it. It's got a symmetric brush that draws the same on both sides. I'm currently making a Texture creator with the same idea in mind, just instead of just being symmetric on the X axis it will also be Y depending on the user's preferences and also it works through alpha brushes that can snap to certain positions of the grid and if the brush goes out of the image boundaries the part that is cut off is set to the other side of the image. It's coming out quite nice. :)

Use your graphics app of choice, save the separate pieces of your sprite (arms, legs, etc...) as separate .png files and use spriter to create the animations with them. I am loving it so far.

Graphics gale is a good 2D animation software.

humanbalance.net/gale/us

Also Spriter (www.brashmonkey)

andd Spine (www.esotericsoftware.com

Hello. I just started constructing. A couple days ago I found "inkscape". Free. You move a sprite into it and tell it to make it mathematical. It does it's best and changes the object to lines and boxes and circles that you can move around, manipulate etc.

say you have a stick-man. You just duplicate it, move the arm line upwards a little and rotate if neccessary, then duplicate again and move a little bit more, then duplicate again... so you have the frames of an animation. BUT...

There is also one neat feature called "interpolation" What you do is you put the first frame, and make the last frame, and choose two frames and say interpolate in x steps. The program makes x frames in-between the two frames you fed it. But you should only use simple sprites for this as complicated sprites are not easy to interpolate.

Watch this:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4cqxvIXefk

Best regards;

Is photoshop any good for making animations for a game?

Has anyone experience in that area??

Have a look at Spine :

http://esotericsoftware.com/

— I used photoshop for making my animations. It works well but the workflow is sort of awkward (I had to save every PNG individually, for instance). I'm sure there's a better way but I never learned properly.

It will never be as good as something like Spriter, but the bonus is of course you can change pixels on the fly, while still getting layers to work with and move individually.