We made Monster Math - to make mundane but important Arithmetic practice super-fun!
All the characters are fully animated using Spine!
Our USP is a huge sequence of story animations, and these characters look really amazing when they are able to breathe, blink, move around, fight, etc. in those scenes. And of course, powers and other cool stuff that these monsters have in the game play area.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monster-math-fun-math-game/id924441242 (full version)
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monster ... d931943412 (freemium)
Trailer:
(direct link) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PIlYuSmi7w
Some learnings:
Make simple individual animations (as many discrete ones as possible) and combine them in code. for e.g. our idle animations are all separate - blinking, breathing, slight moving of limbs - and they get stitched together at run-time. Makes it a lot more real and much faster to build those animations
Make sure only the required nodes are selected for a particular animation keyframe. This makes it easy to reduce overlap between the independent animations that can run together without interfering with each other.
We had to write some custom code for sequencing the animations properly if something had to start after current animation is over - but that's because of the way we built our story-engine
Check out more about our game at http://www.makkajai.com!