creating 2d sprites for games ?

Question

i am pretty new to developing games...i thought i would begin by making a simple 2d game....

curious what tools are commonly used to transform images to pixel sprites ? or is this done by hand, if so what tools are used ?

even better, is there a marketplace where i can purchase game sprites and other game assets ?

Answer 1

Sprites are usually of fixed size, 8x8, 16x16, 32x32, etc., although of course some platforms may allow arbitrary sizes too. Sprites are images, I'm not sure what the transform is that you'd be asking about; you've got to load some data and pass that data to your "sprite renderer," so at some point you'll need to get the input data into the engine format, but that'll depend on the engine. Many engines can "natively" take jpegs and pngs and do the transform for you.

I don't know of any marketplaces in particular, but you could post on craigslist or something, looking for an artist to create these assets.