Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
2D graphic assets
In the following section, we will describe the most important types of 2D assets used
in the game development.
Sprites
Sprites can be defined as game objects that have a role in the gameplay of a title: the
main character (we use the word character here in its broadest meaning: a space ship
is a character), enemies, bullets, and collectibles are all examples of sprites. Sprites
are usually animated, which means that the artist draws a sequence of frames rep-
resenting the key positions the game object assumes during the animation for each
animated character and for each specific animation. The final result is an image called
spritesheet that contains all the animations of a game character. The following figure
represents part of the spritesheet of Super Mario Bros for the NES.
Once the sequences are made, it's up to the programmer to invoke the correct se-
quence for each desired animation through code. The 2D-oriented game engines,
such as GameMaker (
http://www.yoyogames.com/studio
), provide easy sprite anima-
tion management tools. We will discuss the topic of game engines with more detail in
To reduce the size of the file of images used in a game, there is a very popular and
long-used technique which consists of cutting down the number of colors (color depth)
used in the image: the fewer the colors, the smaller the file size. Such an operation
can be automatically done by common image editors, such as Photoshop. Since cut-
ting down the number of colors of an image can result in a speckled image, it is a
