Spriter is an exciting tool for building game animations being developed by BrashMonkey. Like many other interesting little-guy innovations of our time, Spriter started its life on KickStarter. Spriter produces a simple format called SCML that’s designed to be consumed by third-party game engines.

Since I’m a proud sponsor and future user of Spriter I wrote a SCML parser / playback tool as part of a Scheme game engine I’m working on. The SCML code is nicely abstracted from the rest of my engine so it should be very easy to port to other LISPy languages if anyone is interested.

In action:

All of the SCML related code is in the spriter.scm file. The only dependency on the rest my code has to do with turning raw XML into an equally raw (but far nicer) tree of s-expressions.

This implements the final (post beta) SCML spec. Interestingly, this may actually be the FIRST implementation of the post-beta spec. I haven’t found any others yet.

To load an animation:

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(define +scml+ (scml-load "monster/Example.SCML"))
(define +idle+ (animation (entity +scml+ "0") "Idle")

The length of the animation (in seconds) is:

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(animation-length +idle+)

To interpolate the animation to any time between 0 and its animation-length:

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(interp-anim anim time)

This returns a list of tkey objects which contain the interpolated rotations, positions, and centers for all of the sprite fragments presented in the order they should be drawn.

Here is an example of those tkey objects being rendered using my engine.

Hopefully this saves someone some time!