Evo!!!! I was the artist that made those flash and attack animations! Pow Studios was my indie game studio for some time Glad to see the animations being used!

So after using your demo, I feel that it needs some improvements. So far, from what I see in the program, is that you drag and drop premade images from premade sequences, and place them in the scene/frame...

..So this is an animation program!(duh) But if its an animation program, it will need quite a few improvements to the GUI as well as animation functionality. Im going approach this as an animator:

1. It needs a timeline/bar/sequence to show visually where the current frame is compared to the whole animation, and be able to drag this position left and right, and have the animation update in realtime. This is scrubbing, and is a very needed tool for animation. Animators can jump to a frame visually, advance frame by frame, just take a look at MED animation.

2. Onion skinning. Onion skinning is an animation tool that causes the last frame of animation to be slightly transparent over the current frame of animation. And because you are manually dropping in images each frame, you need a point of reference to place them. Without them, you will be going back and forth between 2 frames of animation to make sure they are not shaking. If you can make a way to produce a transparent image of the frame before the current one, it would help alot with animators placing the sprites.

3. Animation looping. There should be a playLoop button that will constantly play the animation while looping it (with a stop button of course). This will help animators feel their animation over time. This is really highly subjective language, but most, if not all animation software has a looping function.

4. General speed improvements. How are you handling each sprite and how frames are shown and hidden? If I place 10 muzzle flash sprites in a frame, are these 10 each a different object that need to be hidden and unhidden based on the frame? Right now, it seems very slow to advance a frame, which can be pretty rough when it comes to animation, as animators need everything snappy

5. Rotation and scale of each Sprite needs to be a visual indicator, not a seperate popup window. Think of photoshop or windows paint. If you select something, a box appears around it with anchor points, which you can scale/rotate.

I see this as a VERY powerful tool, not only for 2d games, but for 3d games as well. Many of these sprites can be oriented very easily in 3d space.

My cintiq has been giving me problems the last few days, and I think it will be out of commision for an indeterminate amount of time. I am trying to fix it. Ideally if everything goes OK, I would be able to make more animations for free for this project