[pygame] Good sizes for character sprite pixmaps

[Terry Hancock <hancock@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,
What are good sizes for character sprite resources?

Recently, I started thinking it might be fun to create an
archive of game character resources useful in free-licensed
games. Obvious examples are "Tux", "BSD Daemon", "SuSE
Lizard" etc, but I have some more interesting ideas, too.[1]

I have a pretty solid idea about what to do for 3D resources
(low and high poly renders, etc), but for 2D sprites, things
are a little trickier.  At large scales, a vector drawing is
best, and the scaling isn't so critical.

But small sprites for 2D games tend to look crummy if they
have to be scaled, so it's better to design them at the
right size.  So I'd like to ask if there's any consensus
about what sizes are the most useful to have.  Naively, I
would suspect that good sizes might be:

16x16
32x32
64x64

(Anything bigger than this can probably be scaled?)

Would most pygamers be happy with resources at those scales?

Other sizes that come to mind are 20, 24, 40, 36, 48, 50,
75, and 100, but I don't really want to maintain that many
different sizes.

Is color depth much of an issue any more?  It used to be
that sprites needed to be in 8, 16, or 32 color palettes,
but I wonder if these constraints are meaningful anymore?
Obviously, having full-color makes scaling less sensitive.

Cheers,
Terry

[1] I've said more about this topic in my FSM blog at
http://blog.freesoftwaremagazine.com/users/t.hancock/2006/01/07/free_software_games_need_a_richer_charac

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com