Hi. Newcomer here. First post.

So I'm in games dev, currently self-funding my own thing on iOS. Right now, it's just me and a laptop, and a whole heap of placeholder graphics. I have a question about workflow, and placeholder animations (I realise that 'placeholder' is a term that's used for a specific Spine thing which is nothing to do with what I'm asking about; has made searching the forums harder!).

Rewind a year or so, and I'd kind of assumed that 2D sprite-based animations would be the way forward for my game. So I bolted together some tools to automaticallyish generate hundreds upon hundreds of placeholder animations (essentially: sequences of four identical sprites, each then having the name of the animation and that sprite's frame number super-imposed on top; wound up with about a hundred placeholder anims, for each of six different characters), and wired up the systems code-side to make everything work and have the right placeholder anim displayed at the right time. General idea being, that when I got to the point where I could take an animator on board, they'd just need to generate final in-game animation assets with the same file name, I'd replace my placeholders assets with their finalised versions, and everything would Just Work.

As I'm poking around Spine, though, I'm not seeing a way of doing anything similar. From what I can gather, exporting from Spine exports everything in one go, and then you pull the assets into Unity, and go from there. I guess I was expecting to be able to do some level of these-anims-don't-exist-yet stuff outside of Spine – like take an animation file, dupe it a hundred times, and rename those files. Some sort of slightly quicker, more programmatic, quick-and-dirty-but-allows-me-to-get-the-code-running solution.

Does this mean that, to get to the same level of integration as I'm currently at with my sprite-centric code, but with Spine, I – and I am very much Not An Artist! – would have to go into Spine, manually set up some sort of placeholder animation in Spine for each of 100ish animations across six characters, export, get and then get everything going from there? And then once I was working with an animator, they'd essentially take my Spine project as a starting point, and replace my placeholder stuff with their shippable-quality stuff?

Or am I missing / misunderstanding something?

(career's been in design / production, btw, and I'm only a self-taught coder, so I very easily could have missed something 🤷‍♀️)

Thanks in advance for any help 😄 🙏

[edit: a '~' in front of '100ish' subscripted the text, so I removed it]