Diving into Module 4 discussion:

"Let's get the art and development team sharing information on what it takes to display animations in the game. How do sprite sheets work? How are the sprite sheet assets created? What is the optimal format for the sprite sheet?" - Westwood

A three part question eh? Well, first off sprite sheets are basically a grouping of images that change slightly to create the animations we all know and love in games. For example a walk animation has to have the feet, arms, and even head move each step. Each stage of the animation is a separate image. All these images in one place create a sprite sheet for the movements of a character.

Creating a sprite sheet is usually done in a graphics program such as Photoshop. You want to copy an original image and move parts of it slightly to make a realistic animation (too much and it is jerky, too little and the movement is too slow). The sheet can then be tested to be sure it is all working properly in Flash or some other program that can combine the images in the form of frames to create a movie clip of the animation. The links in this module go to programs or sites that help put these sheets into some form of order. With more complicated sprite sheets this might be necessary (though with the one I posted I think I got it under control).

The optimal format for a sprite sheet seems to be a PNG image with the sprites that make up an animation evenly spread out. When discussing this with my partner they requested that each sprite be the same size as well. So in my case each sprite was 64X64 pixels, so each frame of the animation is that size. The reason that the images are PNG are so that you can see the background, since PNG supports transparency layers.

It seems I already have most of this under wraps, but I will see what sort of feedback I get from the instructors on my submission in a bit.