Flash even optimizes the arrangement to ensure the smallest possible file size. You can keep working with vector art in an animation, but convert to bitmap imaging for the final game.įrom animated vector to bitmap: Flash CS6’s sprite sheet feature will export an animation as a series of frames, all saved in a single file. Sprite sheets fix this problem and make creating games with vector art possible. But with so many mobile devices surfing the Web and becoming a de facto game platform, game developers could not use Flash vector art in games anymore because they simply could not be sure that the game would run smoothly. Since running the animation relied on the processing power of a desktop computer, this worked out fine. Animating vector art was advantageous because of the small file size. When Flash was first developed, the goal was to create animations for the Web, and bandwidth was the main issue. This technique has been used in game development for years because it requires the least amount of processing power the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) does the heavy work. In a game, you create the animation by loading this single image and moving it quickly from one coordinate to another.
Generating sprite sheets in Flash CS6 is quite simple: Create a pixel-based animation and put all the sprites in one large flat image file.
