Week 2 - Sprite Sheets Research

Unit 8 Week 2

Tuesday 19th April 2016

http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/an-introduction-to-spritesheet-animation--gamedev-13099

“A sprite is a single graphic image that is incorporated into a larger scene so that it appears to be part of the scene.”

The point of a sprite is to lessen the impact on memory a game will have, allowing more memory to be used on other processes. It also allows players to interact with the world easier and developers to have an easier time manipulating things like character or objects in the game.

“Sprite sheets are used to speed up the process of displaying images to the screen; It is much faster to fetch one image and display only a part of that image than it is to fetch many images and display them.”

This not only means that I can limit the size of the game, but will have far less files to go through, meaning less complexity.

“Sprite sheet animation is nothing more than taking a sprite sheet and changing which sprite is rendered in quick succession to give the illusion of movement, much like a film projector displaying a movie.”

This cycling means that I won’t need to keep animating a character more than one cycle, as it would keep looping as long as it would be needed. It also means that I can predict how many sprites I will need to make by how many action cycles I need.

“A frame is a single image (or sprite) from the sprite sheet. When the frames are put in an order that creates a continuous movement, it creates a cycle.”

Sprite sheets usually have more than one set of sprites on, this means that you can have an entire character’s movements on one sheet, rather than create multiple sheets. This helps when trying to  organize different files during development, and helps condense the size of the game file.

This has shown me that I will need to develop several sprite sheets for my game. I will need to think about the different actions that characters will make and draw sprites for all of them. 

I should also think about the size of each sprite and their complexity, as I will need to draw each one multiple times, so having simpler designs will benefit this process

The use of sprites will allow me to make characters in my game without lots of complex animation techniques. All I need to do is play several images in a row to make it appear like the character is continually moving. It also lets me use images as a base for others, such as character movement or size of objects.