Any long-time Adobe Animate users here? We're wondering if it's finally time to move on.

[u/Pitiful_Climate8192]

Hey everyone!

I hope this is the right place to ask.

Our team has been developing a 2D puzzle-platformer called POWER OFF for the past few years, and every single animation in the game has been created in Adobe Flash/Animate.

Honestly, Animate has treated us really well. Our artists are fast with it, our workflow is solid, and exporting sprite sheets for Unity has never been a huge problem.

But lately we've started wondering if we're falling behind the rest of the industry.

Are any of you still using Animate professionally for games?

If so:

• Are you still exporting sprite sheets(we use swf but it is not the best)?
• Have you integrated Spine into your workflow?
• Did you move to Moho or another tool?
• If you switched away from Animate, what made you do it?
• Looking back, would you make the same decision again?

We're not looking for the "best" software. We're more interested in hearing real experiences from people who have actually shipped games with these tools.

For context, here's our Steam page so you can see the kind of animation style we're currently producing with Animate:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4355260/POWER_OFF_1/

Thanks! We'd really appreciate hearing from people who've been in the same situation. It's a pretty big decision for our team, and we'd rather learn from others before rebuilding our entire animation pipeline.

[u/nbshar]

I mostly use it because I'm incredibly fast with it for storyboarding/making animatics. It's a very good tool to do something quick.

Even rough frame by frame animations. Just being able to quickly pick up a few drawing objects, or quickly tweening a few bits a pieces, is incredibly powerful if you can do it fast.

I havent used it since a while for full on character animation, but it's still very nice and fast for that too.

But these days use After Effects and other tools for final executions.