Animating North and South

dr_sakari

ok, so I'm looking to make a game, but was having issues with the large work load involved in the sprites. Spine looks like it'd be nice to help with this and it works well with Game Maker. The only problem I'm having with this is that I'm wanting the game to have a more isometric look to it, like hyper light drifter.
Spine looks like it's be great making animations for movement to the east and west (Right and left side of the screen), but I've seen no examples of the ability to make north and south movement animations (Top and bottom of the screen). Could someone tell me if the Spine program would even have the ability to do this?
Short of this, the only other option I can think of would be to do something complicated, like use Spine to make east and west and then somehow have the program ditch the Spine file for north and south.

Zephyr

Animating with depth is slightly harder than animating side movement in 2D indeed.

But basically Spine gives us the tools to animate characters in all directions. For many cases, it is sufficient to scale bones or meshes along their main axis, just play around with it. By adding gradient shadow layers with fading opacity during animations, the effect of depth can be emphasized.
In animations like wielding a sword or aiming with a gun, you can swap the images that completely change their face.

A typical walk cycle towards the camera involves scaling of legs, (smooth & gradient) shadows and swapping of the feet:
http://media.tumblr.com/6122246b597b619b3ff7eb96ac567264/tumblr_inline_mjkkqgJkPe1qz4rgp.jpg

I think nearly every animation can be split up into its simple components that change (rotate, scale, sheer, shadow, swap). Anyhow, it’s still a challenge to do and will need some practice in Spine.

Søren

The game Delver's Drop uses Spine and is an isometric game. I believe they used multiple skeletons in the same project file to achieve what you're looking to do. One skeleton for each direction.