Twin stick shooter platformer?

meds

I'm working on a 2D 'twin stick' shooter platformer where the player aims and fires with the mouse and can run around freely with WASD (prototype example here: http://ec2-52-55-196-121.compute-1.amazonaws.com/demo/badhombres/index.html)

I just wanted to know how easy it would be to implement the character aiming independently of running around? Are there any examples of this out there I can look at?

Pharan

Spine's system was designed with this in mind. Two (or more) animations can be played at the same time. The bottom animation track can be for running. the 2nd track can be for shooting. And aiming can be controlled via Spine's built-in IK or custom IK code.

This is an old demo game done a long time ago before Spine's IK features:

Its code can be found here: GitHub - EsotericSoftware/spine-superspineboy: Example platformer game for spine-libgdx
Because of the new IK Constraints, controlling aiming is now more straightforward to do in code than that old example.

This is a recent release by Super Mega Team done using Spine for its animations:

meds

oh those are some damn good examples 🙂

I've been talking to some artists who use Spine to work on a Unity3D game with me, I just wanted to know - would I need to purchase a license for myself to make use of their work if they make the art and animations in Unity or can I get away with just using the run times (including coding the trick look at mouse pointer stuff).