I have reworked the front page. If you have time to look at it and tell me if it makes you less doubtful I would appreciate it. No pressure though, you already helped me much.
No - spritestacking is not as effective for the most of things but there is something playful about it - it changes the way you think about what you draw which imposes an unique style on your creations.
2) You can safely buy current version as the next update will replace it - as in - you get the new software.
3) I need a few more months to finish it but I want to release the rendering part of the app (simply without animator) for my patrons in July - https://www.patreon.com/spritestack
QA: Yes it's completely safe to buy current version as it is going to be updated with the revamped software.
Thank you very very much for such a detailed experience. It's super helpful and I will address it. I've learned that behind one person with certain problem there are number of people that will just abandon it without ever being vocal about it - so it's pretty much always worth to fix what at a fist glance might look like an individual experience. Sorry that you had to dig for answers.
I keep some alive but they are really just burning my budget which is quite poor since I am a full time indie wannabe so I consider shutting them down.
It's not really just the nostalgia. It's taking the base from that point in time while applying things that were not computationally possible back in the day. It's a continuation of that style that many simply appreciate and it's not going away anywhere. Sure we can have photorealistic movies but somehow people still appreciate cartoons.
I am sorry to be that guy but your assumptions are wrong. Rendering voxels is much more expensive than rendering regular meshes. The polygon count is actually tremendous. Getting detailed models with voxels requires a lot more data than polygon based mesh.
These units were a huge inspiration for me - if you dig through various modding forums you will notice that they use a lot of unknown dedicated software and that there are tons of models created outside of the gamedev bubble by extremely talented people that have nothing to do with the industry on a daily basis and because of that they remain pretty much anonymous.
Please check out my twitter for current examples - I have been polishing this renderer for 2 years now and it has improved a lot https://twitter.com/rezoner/media
I am not using spritestacking as a mean to render things since a long time. It's intentionally sharp, low res and non antialiased because that's the style I like in games.
Thank you. It's coded from start to end because I am not familiar with any software that do trailers. I first coded it then wrote music (in FLStudio) that is aligned with events in a demo.
Ahoy. I am the author of SpriteStack.
I am really honored to be on HN front page and I would like to straighten some misconceptions about this app.
The version that is available and its trailer has little to do with the current state of the application.
New release brings voxels, lowpoly and sprites together to create 3D animated game objects and export them as 2D spritesheets. It's purpose is not to replace your favorite software (Aseprite, MagicaVoxel, PicoCAD...) but to bind them all together into something even more useful from a 2D gamedeveloper point of view. So it can import - a lot of things.
Quality pixelart is more expensive than 3D assets. You get all angles and bone based animation from a model while you have to draw every animation frame in every angle manually with 2D approach. On top of that a 3D world brings easier customisation and reusability of assets.
If you don't have better ideas for improving your packet size at least push your JSON through msgpack. Using strings as keys (properties) is ultra bad for your bandwidth too. In general JSON is only suitable for turn based games.
It is a voxel editor. Except the voxel is represented by one pixel while in software like Magica the voxel is a 3d cube. The display is achieved by sprite stacking which means layering flat images on top of each other to give a 3d illusion. It's less capable than any other 3d method but it can be used in a 2d engine with zero 3d knowledge.