Hi Nate, sure, we are doing the following:
- An artist uses Spine to create skeleton body with an item that stem from one specific bone, let's say a hero body and a helmet.
- We export that to json.
- We use our utility to seperate item from body into two json files, one for body and for item (or two items).
- Again, in Spine an artist creates a copy of entire skeleton and creates a different item (a hat with it's own bone structure)
- Repeat steps 1-3 for 20 items
- Also, we create multiple hero bodies (similar skeleton yet different enough), lets say we have 10 of those
We end up with 10 bodies and 20 items instead of 200 items/combinations. This is a simplified example since we also have weapons and a few more item bones for different type of items.
Our utility is used to separate body from item so we can make any combination during runtime. We modified Cocos2d-x runtime to support skeleton attachments which we later attach to before mention specific bone (slots on that bone). Some bone renaming is also involved, I believe all the coordinates and animation transformations are kept as they are.
We cannot have this separated in Spine as our artist must see and work on a plethora of animations, also there is no support for skeleton attachments / or bone group (no real need for a separated skeleton, an interchangeable bone group would do the job). This would be a feature that would make Spine THE tool (copy-paste to different skeleton would also be nice to have 
).
In the end we managed to establish a workflow that works for us, but it could be faster and more natural.
To wrap things up, we end up with json but binary is faster so we need that conversion added to build/publish pipeline.
I believe a lot of Spine users would welcome this features. Thanks!
p.s. I would love to here some feedback about our workflow, is there a better way?