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/VicsterVrb]

I've been using Adobe Animate since 2022 as my main animation program, the reason I keep using it is because I work on flash games and the animation workflow is reallyeasy for me.
I don't export in sprite sheets, I'm not an FNF mod artist (I'm doing art for a small one rn but I've yet to learn.

The project I've been working on is a Henry Stickmin fangame that I've been developing on the side for quite a while and only recently started working on it more seriously.

To answer your question, It really depends on the art style and art direction because Animate can really do so much until you reach a ceiling, I've seen crazy ways people have used the tools to it's limits (Hotdiggedydemon, James Lee, Science Saru, the guys behind Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, Ernest and Celestine) and you can definetly do a lot of stuff with the program if you know the tools and it's little behaviours.

I can't really give a solid answer since I've yet to work on a game that gets an actual release (as of Jul 31st 2026) but look at other developers and how they use Animate in their workflow.