2D Spine

[Hotshot]

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/esotericsoftware/spine

It look great and they have reached the goals of funds...

[Kirl]

Looks great, but coding my own inferior solution is much more fun!

[combatking0]

Looks good. I've been trying to do this in 3D for a while.

[Raizor]

That does look rather lovely. Glad they've reached (and far exceeded) their target. This lead me onto LibGDX, which also looks pretty great.

I downloaded the trial of Spine, and it's very impressive. The GUI alone blew me away

[Shockwave]

This was really interesting to watch.. A long time ago (whispers - 23 years ago!)  I remember taking a trip to Arc Developments where my mate was working as a musician.. There was a job as a trainee graphics artist which I was going for.  I came away from there with a test to animate a racoon walking through a forest.

I spent days on that animation trying to perfect the walking motion and it looked ok I suppose.. While I was at Arc they gave me some demos of some amazing silicon graphics stuff, one of the things I saw was a walking 3D robot and I was glad that the 2D game was still in wide use and that I had a glimmer of hope of a future as a graphics artist. 

After I watched this clip I had a look at The Last Samurai and Turrican 2 on Youtube because they are the finest examples of 16 bit raster animation I can think of and of course they work in much more blocky resolutions thank this...

The quality even eclipses the Oddworld games, quite astonishing really - I hope the guy who wrote it gets plenty of cash.