primarily a homestuck artist, currently working on @burningdownthehouse and vast error.
whats the reasoning for gamedevs who make asset packs deciding that each thing needs like 30 feet between itself in a fuckin png, especially like. 9-slices and shit. like. i should not need to pay for an uber to get from the top left corner to the top middle corner come on
"i made an icon pack! heres the download, and here's three months rations for the travel between the sword and the shield"
there's actually a reason for this!!! I'm on my phone right now so I can't make a demo, but basically, the closer textures are together the more likely it is that the GPU will try to take pixels from a neighboring sprite when you do things like rotate/scale/translate them at runtime. there are also some shader techniques (like outline/drop shadow) that benefit from drawing the invisible pixels around a sprite (so those parts also get drawn and you can stick in your funky effect)
Mipmaps, compression, filters, whole buncha stuff really. Besides, it's just images, if it's really that bad, nothing's stopping you from just grouping them more closely together.
