Thanks very much everyone! I'll try to put all of this to use. My wife has been making great strides in learning the program and this can only help.

New user here! I'm working with my wife to make games using Spine animation.

We're having some trouble. Now unlike what marketers seem to think, putting extremely useful features behind a paywall does not in fact cause more money to magically appear in my bank account to pay for it; therefore, I've got to live with the feature set that the Essential license gives me. (Don't get me wrong... I don't begrudge the developers the price tag for their hard work. I just can't afford it!)

To that end, I've been trying to live without inverse kinematics. Idle and dance animations have felt utterly impossible to reliably create without being able to anchor the foot bones in place - I've been scratching my head at how to work with such a huge handicap. I was under the impression that Spine hasn't always had IK available, so I thought techniques must exist.

Does anyone have any advice? I'd love to hear anything from a veteran.