Three slot symbol animations in three prompts, for $0.35
Riggy turns layered PSD artwork into Spine animations through chat. This two-layer eye, a slot symbol, needed a landing squash, an idle loop and a win animation. One prompt built the rig and all three animations; two one-line corrections refined them. Model charges totaled $0.35, with about 2 min 40 s of waiting for replies. Here is the result, then every prompt with its price and response time.
The result
Switch between idle, drop and win. These are the exported Spine 4.2 files playing in the official Spine Web Player. The input was a PSD with two layers — the eyeball and the pupil — and no bones.
One prompt for three animations
Three animations are needed here.
drop — the eye as if it has just landed from above: it squashes sharply, then springs back and returns to its normal state. The pupil should drop down by inertia and wobble around the eye too.
idle — a 4-second looped animation. The eye just moves its pupil in different directions, sometimes smoothly, sometimes sharply.
win — the win animation: the pupil should dart around sharply in different directions, then suddenly grow and return. The whole animation should take one second.
From that, the model placed two animation bones under the root — the eyeball and the pupil on it — and built all three animations. In drop the eye squashes flat on impact, overshoots on the rebound and settles with a couple of smaller wobbles, while the pupil lags behind it. In idle the pupil drifts slowly, holds, and darts sharply, around a four-second loop. In win it darts in four directions and then pops bigger.
Two corrections, one line each
drop — I want the pupil, during the fall, to really drop to the bottom of the eyeball and then snap back.
The pupil now falls to the bottom of the eyeball, holds for a beat and snaps back with a small overshoot. The change log for this reply lists one track: the pupil's movement in drop.
win — all good, but the growth needs to be bigger. Almost the size of the eye.
The pupil now grows almost to the size of the eye at the peak of the win, then snaps back.
These corrections cost $0.038 and $0.027. Charges depend on the tokens a reply uses and on the model selected.
The bill
| Prompt | What it did | Cost | Response time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | rig + drop, idle, win | $0.289 | 2 min 12 s |
| 2 | drop: the pupil falls further | $0.038 | 17 s |
| 3 | win: a bigger pupil | $0.027 | 11 s |
| Total | a symbol with three animations | $0.354 | 2 min 40 s |
Response time is from sending a prompt to the model's reply. From uploading the PSD to the last reply took under 10 minutes. The project ran on Claude Sonnet 5; you pick the model per project, and each prompt is billed by the tokens it uses — how pricing works.
Why it was this quick
- Simple artwork. Two layers, two bones, motion on bones only. When a symbol needs its shape to bend, that is a mesh job — see the jelly worm.
- A clear brief. Each animation got its name, its length and its feel — "sometimes smoothly, sometimes sharply", "by inertia" — and each correction named one animation and one change.
Put it in your engine
The eye's files are on the examples page: plain Spine 4.2 JSON, an atlas and its page. The Phaser 4 guide walks through loading and playing a rig, including one-shots like drop and win that return to idle. Shipping a game with the Spine Runtimes requires a Spine license from Esoteric Software, whoever made the skeleton — see licensing.