

Sometimes it is amazing how many images are required for even a small video-game - SergeDavid
http://www.blog.knolif.com/Image-Overload/

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alanfalcon
Proper planning is key, both to ensure that you don't find yourself suddenly
and unexpectedly needing 500 new images, and to find areas for optimization.

What's the value in having enemies have slight differences in appearance as
they get close to death? Will players actually notice or care about this? In a
2D games, it probably makes a lot more economical sense to add some kind of
procedural effect to show this, such as tinting them red, making them flash,
or showing a bright red outline.

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SergeDavid
That can work (as I'll dot that for frozen aka slow characters or rage aka
fast characters) However certain things just can't be replaced, like a big
bite out of a plant or a black eye on another character with blood on the
corner of their mouth.

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hnsmurf
This is why video game companies hire more artists than programmers.

Counting frames is often not productive though, cut-out animations (which PvZ
appears to be using) allow artists to render many frames from one base
illustration and some extra work. They're not necessarily easy but they're
often a large time savings over frame by frame.

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SergeDavid
Yes, my idea behind it is generally draw a sprite, copy it into a new frame,
move some parts of it, then reconnect and clean up the ugliness that results
from an arm being completely disconnected from a shift in the rest of the
image.

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chipsy
According to a pixel artist friend of mine, all the companies he's worked for
using those types of anims will build a proprietary tool that essentially
works like Flash in a pure-bitmap context; tweening, scaling, rotation, and
bitmap cutouts(e.g. parts that bulge and bounce, like the belly of a fat
character, simply reuse an area of the sprite and layer it on top). These
tools are used for menu layouts and level design as well as sprites.

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heux
This is incredibly true. I've been making a flash game recently, and it's my
first, but I've just been overwhelmed with how many images are required. At
every step I'm realizing, "Oh damn, I need images for this. _Finds my graphics
buddy_ "

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SergeDavid
It really is a labor of love, best advice really is do as little organic /
moving items as possible. They can be added later without feeling the need of
"Oh my god not another batch!"

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bazookaBen
truly a work that never ends.

I started my indie game 4 months ago, and i'm still adding a few touches here
and there. Guess it's a creator's bane.

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limmeau
There have been some approaches to client-side image generation in computer
games [1][2], but they're not very successful commercially.

1\. <http://ifarchive.jmac.org/> 2\. <http://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/>

