What program do you use to animate your game? Any free ones?

[3700]

Any suggestions?

[Darth Mandarb]

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=32234.0

[Sslaxx]

Depends I guess. There's the GIMP (which does a fair whack of what PhotoShop does) - http://www.gimp.org/ or Inkscape if you want to work with vectors - http://www.inkscape.org/ - or Blender http://www.blender.org/ if you want to do 3D (also Google SketchUp - http://sketchup.google.com/ - and Sculptris - http://www.sculptris.com/ - for 3D too). Certainly, GIMP and Blender can do animation. SynFig - http://www.synfig.org/ - might be useful too animation-wise, you'd have to check it out.

[Calin Leafshade]

any opportunity to plug www.aseprite.org.

I use a self compiled version of 0.8beta and i find it so quick and easy to use for pixel art.

[karja]

These two are not free but they got free trials if you want to try them out:

Adobe Flash
Toon Boom studio

[GarageGothic]

Toon Boom is awesome, I really dig vector drawing for animating since I'm not a pixelart guy. Too pricey though, and requires good keyframing skills for a decent result. A less expensive alternative more directed at amateurs is Anime Studio which also has some sweet tools for cutout animation.

[Charity]

I've been using The Gimp for everything, and it works pretty well,  but just checked out aseprite 'cause Calin and damn is it cool.  I miss some of the features I'm used to in the older, more powerful program, but for sprite animating it seems pretty near perfect, or like it will be once I figure out how to move frames around, etc.

[Calin Leafshade]

you can move frames with Ctrl + dragging but you cant move the background so to move it you need to do it on a layer of its own or just make the background a real layer.

onion skinning also only works on proper layers with transparency.

if your going to use it though I dont recommend the current 'stable' version.. its pretty pants and not all that stable.

the latest 0.8beta is far better but i've only managed to compile it on linux.

but for speed and ease I have yet to find anything better (no i havent used ProMotion)