So John, you may be asking, why are you posting an animation tool on this website? No, we have not suddenly become a generic indie gaming blog, but this is something we thought that our indie developer readers might find interesting. You see, there is this amazing animation tool under development (public beta version available) called Spriter, and if you're not using/can't afford Flash and have a limited budget this tool might just fit the bill, and from the looks of it at least one of the developers is a Brony! The tool is highly optimized and has plugins under development for various engines, so you can make your game look as good as possible while using far less memory then traditional methods of video game animation. 

Now, if you go to their Kickstarter page that I above they give a far better explanation of how it works then I ever could, and you can support their project by backing it, although they already have a lot of donations. You can also visit the developer's website at http://www.brashmonkey.com/index.htm, in case you're interested in their own video game project that they're working on. At the moment Spriter is Windows-only, although they plan on adding Mac (and eventually Linux) support sometime past the release of 1.0.