Assets are the building blocks of your game. They will essentially make up 100 percent of your game, regardless of whether you are creating a 3D blockbuster, or a 2D platformer as we will in this book.
There are various assets you will either create, purchase, or have created for you for your project. Let's break them down.
What?! Don't worry, not a watery sprite as in, say, Homer's The Odyssey. When it comes to video game assets, sprites are essentially images that are used in your game. See that Mario image in the intro of this chapter? That right there is a sprite. Sprites can also be used for special effects, such as 2D lens flares or particles. Sprites are usually created in sprite sheets containing characters and their animations, such as the following image, which is a ripped sprite sheet from one of the many Megaman titles:
Sprites can be super easy to create, or they can be massively complex and take many hours to draw. Yes, draw. Sprites can be drawn in any...