Stateful 2D Characters: Damage, Logos, and Art That Persists

In the last devlog I talked about how rough Replace Art still felt. Edits were fragile, and anything you changed tended to fall apart once you changed poses or swapped art. What I didn’t expect was that working through those problems would lead to something much more interesting: a system where art edits belong to the character, rather than a single frame. 

In the clip above, I’m overlaying a hurt expression and adding damage to create a “hurt” pose, then flipping back and forth between poses. The scratches and facial expression stay exactly where they should. They’re not baked into a single image or animation frame — they carry across poses because they’re part of the character itself. All of this works with your own artwork — any PNGs you import can be posed, edited, swapped, and layered the same way.

🗂️ The Problem With Disposable Frames

Traditionally, many sprite-based 2D workflows treat frames as the primary unit of authoring. If a character takes damage, changes outfit, or gains a visual detail, that information often has to be manually reapplied per frame — or baked into an entirely new sprite set. I wanted something different: edits that stick, no matter how the character moves or changes in appearance.

🎨 Identity That Survives Customisation

Here I’m swapping the torso art and recolouring the outfit. the new outfit doesn't actually have the logo but the old outfit does, yet despite changing to a new outfit I am able to carry the logo through in the same position. This makes team uniforms, variants, and character customisation fast instead of destructive.

🔄 Art That Moves With the Character

You can see that any additional art (such as the white armband I add above) becomes part of the limb itself. Rotate the arm, flip the pose, or preview an animation — the armband follows naturally because it’s baked into the limb’s local space. This is what makes accessories and overlays behave like part of the limb, rather than fragile screen-space overlays.

🧭 A Shift in Direction

This feature pushed the tool from a simple pose editor into something closer to a character authoring system — where visual state(damage, facial expressions, uniform logos) can persist across some of the animations.

🚀 What’s Next

Next up is exporting posed characters directly to PNG spritesheets, so these edits can go straight into a game engine. I’m also starting to wire undo/redo into the art pipeline so experimenting stays safe.

💭 Closing Thoughts

This update took longer than expected, but it’s one of those moments where the pieces finally click.

I’m sharing this early to get feedback. If you’re an artist, animator, or dev who’s wrestled with 2D workflows, I’d genuinely love to hear what you think.