I fiddled with this software for about 6.8 hours, and I'm pretty disappointed in it. This is terrible software for making sprite animations. For some reason the software loves to use the thick black outlines on sprites, and it's horrendous. It makes the sprites look terrible when you import them into the game. If you are creating sprites from scratch, you are better off using something else, not this.

I'm a professional animator and digital artist with a huge love of fighting games and flashy combos. I'm also completely programming-illiterate. This is the game I used to fantasize about.

The editor takes a bit of getting used to, but once you understand what's what, it's incredibly simple to use and puts a ton of potential at your fingertips. It allows someone like me, with zero programming knowledge, to create branching move trees, charged and uncharged projectiles, transformations, weapon-switching attacks, and all sorts of other wild ♥♥♥♥ that I would have zero idea how to code otherwise.

Did I mention my digital art experience is exclusively 3D? The rig system is that good. The in-betweens are messy and tend to blur some of the detail, but there's genuinely no way around that without cleaning up every in-between by hand - which you can do by baking the rig to individual sprite frames, if you feel so inclined. Personally, I've just been using the basic rig and occasionally drawing the VFX for certain attacks, and I'm genuinely impressed by how good it looks in motion.

The game's not without its flaws, and it's probably not a good choice for Baby's First Animation Project - you'll have a much easier time with the editor if you already have a general idea of how animation programs tend to work. That said, the devs have clearly put a lot of effort into making it as beginner-friendly as possible, and I found a lot of their tutorials and documentation legitimately helpful. Also, I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love the entire concept of this game and I've wanted to play something like it for years. Fingers crossed they continue supporting Smack Studio for a long time.

This game is loaded with potential but the devs are honestly handling this game super poorly. When the 1.0 dropped I didn't really notice any different gameplay. The only thing I did notice was the menu looked a bit nicer and they added a stage editor, which isn't even that good from what I've heard. The characters they added in 1.0 are broken. The developer that worked on the new characters, ARK, told the community in the Discord, quote, "I'm hearing a whole lot of skill issues here" when people mentioned how unbalanced the new characters are. The online is super buggy and very unstable, and even in solo play I had to restart my game a few times because it got stuck loading the stage. It's not really worth it, in all honesty. These developers do not care about their game, or at least it seems that way.