Having played Flash games in the 2010s, I was accustomed to the style and charm of characters being rig-animated rather than the usual frame-by-frame. Being your usual programmer who could just barely draw up something fine, I wanted to make rigs and take advantage of procedural animation (characters looking at any angle, inverse kinematics, etc). This is apparently a big ask, as every opportunity comes with some major caveat.
Let’s start with a bit of context; I primarily want to make my games in frameworks like Macroquad or pygame(-ce). These are very simple frameworks, so much so that they don’t have any visual editor to lay things out. This is fine as most visual work like level design, textures, etc. are done in separate programs.