This is just a story I would like to share with you. Perhaps there are people out there who are facing a similar dilemma and they may (or may not) find this useful. It is also meant as a thumbs up for the developers.
So, a few days ago, I finally made the decision: I purchased Spine Essentials. I have to admit that it was a difficult decision, since I am a student and I do not have a lot of money to invest in stuff like this. But then again, I really wanted to pick up game development as a hobby again.
The difference in price between Spine Essentials and Spine Professional initially put me off. I really wanted the features Spine Professional has to offer, but I do not have the money for it. At first, it did not seem like Spine Essentials was that different from, say, Spriter. One of the benefits of Spriter was that its basic features were free and the price of the full version was decent, so I was considering to buy Spriter Pro instead.
Then I started to research Spine more in-depth. What I liked about Spine was that it immediately felt more professional than Spriter. Updates seemed to be more frequent as well. What eventually sold me on Spine was the ability to easily export skeletons and texture atlases, as well as being able to import them easily in one of the officially supported runtimes. I could not find an alternative that provided the same workflow
at least not for LibGDX, the framework I am using.
I am still learning to use Spine, but it is friendly to beginners like myself, so I already managed to create some basic animations and integrated them in my application without too much effort. This is very encouraging and motivating.
Thanks for this great piece of software. Keep it up.
