Creating optimized assets

Let's start with creating optimized sprites for the best performance. How will this affect performance? Think of a game as a video, and your device as the DVD player, or even your TV. The game plays frame by frame and your device displays each frame. However, it has to render each frame. This happens so fast you will never notice it, but now imagine your device has to render large images (let's think dialup internet loading a huge photo). It can take longer and because the device has to work harder, the battery will drain quicker.

This is only one reason that can slow performance; we will discuss other reasons further on.

In the following figure, I've drawn a character design from my last book, and I drew him in Photoshop:

For your information, his name is Kevin. It doesn't look like much does it? Here are the details of the drawing:

• Image size: 52px x 52px
• Color space: RGB
• Compression: None at the moment
• File type: Unsaved

I went ahead and saved the...