Design Importing Sprites

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Xodarap777

Guest
While I design a game - as in, write lots of scripts - I want my graphic designer wife to make my sprites and tilesets. However, she has no interest in touching GMS directly.

I don't want to make a pixelated game - I'm hoping to use her expertise to make a very "smooth" game, like one sees in vector-style Flash (2D) games.

She's very fluent in Adobe programs, including Illustrator. What's my best bet to tell her to start making art in that I can use easily for importing sprites that she draws? Can GMS accept vector graphics? My sprites right now are only 32x32 - is the "smoothness" of that size of sprite at all based on its originating file, or is that just a matter of antialiasing in-game? My pixel-drawn sprites look very ugly and jagged. Or is 32x32 just going to be too crazy small to make it look good? How, for example, would I create/import simple chess pieces if I wanted them to look smooth at that size?

Thanks in advance to anyone able or willing to field such generic, newbie questions. I know that I could Google this, but it's a matter of bridging a gap between a programmer who knows *nothing* of graphic design, and a graphic designer who knows nothing of programming, and Google seems like it might take some digging to find the right angle.
 

YellowAfterlife

ᴏɴʟɪɴᴇ ᴍᴜʟᴛɪᴘʟᴀʏᴇʀ
Forum Staff
Moderator
Can GMS accept vector graphics?
GMS allows to import SWF graphics. If I remember correctly, Adobe Illustrator had an option to export SWF, but animations are more commonly drawn in Adobe Flash (nowadays Adobe Animate).

Otherwise, if you want to be able to scale the graphic without noticeable quality loss, you would import the source files at a higher resolution, as graphics look better when scaled down than scaled up.
 

JackTurbo

Member
I'm a graphic designer by trade and game dev by hobby so probably know both yours and your wife's perspectives a little.

As Yellow mentioned, GMS does support swf vector graphics if you wanted to go down that route.
Its probably not that necessary though you could just use higher resolution raster graphics.

32px is very small and is only suitable for pixel art, they will always be rough and pixelated. If you want sprites to look smooth they need to be a higher resolution. I'd suggest you talk to your wife about the visual style you want and then she could probably recommend a scale based off that, although I'd suggest maybe around either 32*64 or 64*128 if you want your sprites to be detailed and smooth.

As for formating I'd suggest your wife export raster artwork out of either illustrator or photoshop as 24bit PNG's using the "export for web" option.
 
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