Technique Question - Modular Spriting

[Gors]

In my opinion, using modular spriting or common spriting will depend on what you're doing. If it can represent your initial idea without making it look like crap, then it's ok.

If you want an example, just see the expert tugs entries. They were supposed to be game mockups, but I don't think that they are, honestly speaking. Of course, I crapped my pants when I saw such spriting skills, but it didn't scream 'THIS IS A GAME' to me. It's not a bad thing; we're a more artistically-oriented spriting community so it's natural to expect that kind of work.

If that was a real game, though, it would look a lot more rougher, considering that animating huge sprites frame by frame is a pain on the ass and you have a deadline to meet. Obviously you'll want to unite the good and the useful, so here's where modular spriting comes.

- How do they compare to spriting an object as one unit? Does it increase or decrease the difficulty and/or the time to complete a piece? Does the size of the resuting object become a factor?

I think that separing the sprites in small pieces is extremely useful and easy compared to the full spriting. If you want an example, take Joy Mech Fight. It has extremely good-looking animation for a NES game, and each character's sprite sheets doesn't even take the 1/4 of space found in other 8-bit fighting games.

But the main difficulty changes: the hardest part isn't making the pieces, but making them interact decently with lots of coding. Of course, if the programmer is bad, the animations will look like crap and will ruin all the premise of your work. Another downside would be that the characters will commonly look 'disjointed' because of the piece's nature. See Konami/Treasure's games, for example. The robot's arms will usually look like a line of floating balls (Goemon Impact), which might strike out some people as 'weird-looking'.

- How easily is this kind of spriting method implimented into a game? Having a lot of moving parts may be a hefty load to get animated and interacted with in game. Would assembling and animating outside of the game engine be a viable tactic?

I have no idea. But, let's use some common sense here: no one's going to make a single character formed with 50+ small pieces. Programmers will always try to balance the number of pieces and smoothness out so it doesn't turn out exxagerated or lacking.

Also now that you say it, I don't know how people's going to use the Gen 5 Pokémon sprites. Are they willing to animate them, piece by piece? How are they supposed to be animated? By having programmed sprites, it'll be impossible to perfectly recreate the game's animation, and even trying to approach it won't be an easy task.