SYNFIG STUDIO SPEED FULL

Pencil2D: The easiest and simplest program to do 2D animation. Also as you said it's not all that popular and I had a really hard time finding tutorials too. Synfig: Has really good rigging and puppet animations but is really cumbersome and obtuse for frame by frame stuff. So even though it can totally get the job done, the amount of time spent learning it and the slower workflow wasn't worth it for me. For games you likely won't need most of the advanced things it has to offer and will usually be only making short clips of single objects/sprites. The downside? It's a little too powerful and more work than necessary for simple game animations.

SYNFIG STUDIO SPEED FULL

You have everything to make a full blown feature length animation with this. One of the most complete 2D animation programs on this list. I've tried all of those except for Tupi and here's a gist of my experience: There's scarce little relevant info out there as the emphasis is on general animations for cartoons and ads, not gaming. So, can anyone vested in game animation chime in on what they think. Some people have also recommended using Blender's grease pencil, but that's going to take quite some time to learn if it's even worth it. I haven't even gotten around to trying out tupi yet. Pencil2D is simple enough that you don't need to look through tutorials to figure it out, but it really seems lacking in features. Synfig has a lot of polish, nice features like interpolated animations and bones/splines and decent enough basic documentation, but isn't popular making it difficult to find info and tutorials for. It's grown enormous, becoming a very popular art app.

Opentoonz seems to require some effort to learn and it's hard to know if it's worth it for game art, as it's mostly aimed at cartoonists. It does have a decent sized online community though. It just feels really clunky to animate in, like that was some after thought. Krita is great for general digital painting and it can do animation.

I'm happy to work in either pixel, vector or digitally painted art, so that difference doesn't matter. It's difficult to know where to even start. You're completely spoiled for choice when it comes to 2D animation.

Synfig studio speed