Unused Sprites

[Fatboy73]

So I was just wonder, You guys have a shit ton of really awesome sprite sheets that you don't use. I was curious why, especially because you re-use a lot of sprites.

[rijackson741]

Some sprites don't really fit the game very well. We keep them around, because we have them, but it's tough to find a place for them. This is especially true for item sprites. Some of the map sprites too. For maps, we generally try to keep a theme going through the game too, so some sprites (especially ground, etc) get used a lot, others much less.
Can you give some examples of the sprites you are thinking of?

[Fatboy73]

There are a lot of cool monster and NPC sprites that would seem to fit the game, but the same ones keep getting re-used.

[rijackson741]

I guess to use new monster sprites we need to create new monsters, and that's actually quite a lot of work. Much of the reuse is also because if we create a class of monsters, we have fewer sprites than we have members of that class. For example, there are four types of cave snake, but only one sprite for that.

[Fatboy73]

Ah, gotcha. So you need variations on the monsters that there are only one of. I can do that, and let me know if there are specific ones needed.

[Gonk]

I think AT would benefit from some new sprites for the ones that are currently used multiple times.

Would you like to create sprites for some of the existing monsters and NPCs? Then I would offer to change them in AT so they are included in the next update.

But it might confuse players if the change is too significant. So let me check this first.

I think you already know this lists where you can find the icons and the places where they currently appear.

http://andorstrail.irkalla.cz/0.7.0/npclist.php
http://andorstrail.irkalla.cz/0.7.0/monsterlist.php

[Tomcat]

I would vote to make the changes, and just announce they're part of the update, so players know to watch out for new sprites in familiar places.

[rijackson741]

One thing to bear in mind is that a significant portion of the size of the apk (the installer) is the sprites. The more we add, the bigger the apk gets. That's not much of a problem in the developed world, where most people have reasonably recent phones. It's a much bigger problem in the developing world, which is also where a free game is a big deal.

[Tomcat]

Do we distribute each whole set, or just the ones used so far? Is there a rights issue with breaking up sets and putting together just the ones we use?

[rijackson741]

For release, we only distribute the ones we use. Beta versions usually have everything, which is one reason they are much larger.