Talking about Diablo 2's sprites, it used a nice trick of reducing the amount of redundant sprites. Instead of having sprite sheets for every possible equipment combination for all characters, some pieces of equipment were stored in separate spritesets and those were rendered on top of the character base sprite.
I always wondered why more games don't use that approach. I guess it takes a lot of work to implement properly.
Well it's easier now days to render a model in 3D on a rendertarget and use it as a texture in your sprite engine. This is something we would like to do but will not happen for underrail because it would need couple of months to set the engine, do low poly models and textures for all models we now have in the game and getting the animation right. Also we would need to change how we render stuff.
But for another game we would like to go that approach so we can have more animations for characters and overall better looking characters.
Underrail is really a mish mash when it comes to asset creation, some newer stuff looks better than older stuff, well that is the price of early access.
Usually I'm much faster in 3d, something like that I showed I can make in couple of hours production ready with couple of variations, doing that handpainted would take so much more time and it would multiply with every direction variation I want to have.
