Rigby2D passed 100 stars on GitHub today, nineteen days after its first commit.
For a free 2D animation tool that started as one person's project, that is a lot of people deciding it was worth keeping an eye on. Thank you, every one of you.
#Nineteen days
Here is what those days held:
- 16 releases, from 0.1 on 15 October to 0.4.3 yesterday, and 231 commits.
- Runtimes for six engines: Godot, Unity, Cocos Creator, Phaser, the web and Rust, all playing the same animation frame for frame.
- DragonBones projects that open as they were, weapons and effects included, checked against the DragonBones runtime within 0.1 px.
- Ten pull requests from a contributor, maruccimauro, who brought detachable panels, onion skinning, guides and copy and paste of keys. The full story.
- An add-on marketplace, a devlog, and a community on r/rigby2d.
- People talking about it: Alex Hitt's technical review, a feature in Polydium's briefing for Korean studios, and a place on Trendshift's game engine list.
- 1,600+ downloads from the release page, on top of everyone using the browser editor.
#Why the stars matter
A star costs nothing, but for an open-source project it is how the next person decides whether to trust it. Rigby2D asks animators to move their characters, their files and their games' runtimes to something new. Every star says someone already did, and it held up. That is what brings the next animator, the next bug report and the next contributor.
#What's next
This week is about listening: the bugs you hit, the features you miss, the DragonBones and Spine files that don't import the way they should. Those decide what goes into the next release. The issues on GitHub and the threads on r/rigby2d are where that happens, and every one gets read.
Here's to the next hundred.