Pivot

Ever get tired of having to manually draw freehand animated sprites? Well, there's a great free animation program out there that greatly helps with this issue. This program is called Pivot. Here are the easy steps to obtaining Pivot and using it with your games:
 * Follow this link to get to the Pivot download page (It's a free, no-strings-attached download, so don't worry about spending money or having to create an account.
 * The program should soon quickly download. When you're done, open the zipped folder that downloaded.
 * Inside this folder, there will be a program called setup. Run this program and follow the instructions that the installer gives.  The download shouldn't take too long.

Now to create some animations!

 * Open up your recently-acquired Pivot program. It looks like a little stick man with some red dots on him.  This will make sense in a minute.
 * You will now see a screen with some controls to the left and a white screen with a stickman to the right. The stickman is covered with- what do you know- red dots.  These dots can be clicked-and-dragged to move the figure's body parts.  Try this out a bit.
 * As you may know, animation consists of multiple frames, which together comprise an animation. In Pivot, when you are ready for the next frame, simply click the Next Frame button in the lower-left corner.  Easy as that.
 * Continue with this process of animating until you get the animation you want. Now you see why creating animated movies is so hard!
 * When done with your animation, click File > Save Animation. Save it wherever you want as a GIF. Otherwise, it will be incompatible with Game Maker as other formats will work with Pivot only.
 * Don't close Pivot.

All right, now it's time to put your animations in a game!

 * Without closing Pivot, open Game Maker.
 * Create a new sprite.
 * Click Load Sprite.
 * Find your animation, then double-click it to load it (this may take a while if your animation is long).
 * Create a new object and set your recently-created sprite as the object's sprite.
 * Place the object in a room. There you have it!

"What good is this?" you ask
Well, if you create a walking animation, for example, in Pivot, you can load it in Game Maker and trace your character's body on it. This is a great way to make animations for the less artistically inclined. You can make animations with Pivot for nearly anything in your game.

Pivot Advanced Tips
For those who are ready to move on into the deeper realms of Pivot, here are some tips:

Moving the Figure
You can move the figure around the screen by clicking-and-dragging the orange dot in the figure's center.

Creating Your Own Figures
Want to create your own figures? Go to File > Create Figure Type. Here, you can draw your own figure that you want to put in Pivot and later, your game. When you're done creating your figure, you have several options in the File menu: Save, Save As, and Add To Animation. If you ever want to use this figure in more than just this one, you should save it. When you have saved it, click Add To Animation. Name it whatever you want, then click OK to place it in the image.

Current Figure
To the left of the figure, there are several control boxes. Most are self-explanatory, but I'll review anyway: Delete deletes the current figure. Edit lets you edit the current figure. Center brings the current figure to the center of the page. Colour lets you change the color of the current figure. Flip flips the current figure as if a mirror was held up. The box with up and down arrows changes the scale of the current figure. Lastly, Front and Back let you send the current figure to the front layer of the image or the back layer.

Backgrounds
To add in a Bitmap or JPEG background, go to File > Load Background. This lets you load a background you have drawn in Microsoft Paint or a similar program.

Playback
To the upper-left corner of the window, there are several controls: Play, Stop, and a checkbox marked Repeat. There is also a slider to the right of the buttons.
 * Play lets you view the animation you have created.
 * While playing, the Stop button stops it.
 * When checked, the Repeat checkbox makes the animation loop. Un-check it to make the animation stop when complete.
 * The slider changes the frame rate. The lower the button, the slower the animation.  If it is still too fast, add more frames in the animation.

Closing remarks
The Pivot program can be used in many ways to improve your games. Try it for yourself, and you will see. Your animations will be exponentially greater! Their power level will be over 9000! Thanks for reading.