Hi Nate. Thanks for the info. Essential sounds like the right option for me then and a good place to start. I’m by no means a good artist but the spine approach seems much more likely to get workable results for me in a sane amount of time vs manual sprite animations.

I'm currently deciding whether to purchase Spine (having ruled out most other similar packages or rolling my own software) and wondered how often essential receives feature updates vs the pro version? Will most big new features end up in the pro version only with the essential version essentially remaining static? At this stage I'm only looking at the essential version with an eye to upgrade to pro later if I find the software useful (even though mesh deformation looks really useful!).

Thanks!