Spritesheet or Separated PNGs?

Question

So, I'm working on a small indie game, and for that I made my own animation system, it's pretty efficent at the moment, but I have some doubts about how it'll operate, after I add 20-30-100 more animations, because (as the title says) every single frame is a different image, in a separated folder.

So the question is: How will this work, after I add more animations? Will it cause longer loadtimes, or worse performance? I'm not totally sure, because eg. the file size of the same animation on a spritesheet and if separated, are almost the same.

Answer 1

The question you should ask yourself when making this sort of decision is "what is the cost of switching if I chose the simpler solution now, and need the complex solution later"?

In this case, switching involves:

1. Switching your animation system to use the sprite sheet instead of the individual images. This can be really easy if you make your resource fetching and animation calls clean interfaces, and is not too bad unless you do something really horrible in your code.

2. Getting a program that combines your individual sprites into spritesheets. A quick google search will find dozens of simple programs that do this, but if you need to write your own for some reason it shouldn't be that bad either.

So, my non-answer answer is you probably should not care and if you still care, just take an hour or two and try both.