Quote: Original post by Koen
One thing I don't understand is how they deal with the drawing order. Example: if the character is facing away from the camera, its face should be drawn before the helmet. This order is not fixed: it depends on the orientation of the character and the specific shape of the gear. Or do they store some kind of z-buffer in the spritesheet? Or do they fix rules on how the artists have to model everything, so that it fits in the drawing order they've set up?

Once you have your character animated you can determine per-frame what the layer order needs to be and then you just swap layers when necessary in code. If your character is swinging their arm then they're going to swing exactly the same way every time. It's not like switching from a sword to an axe is going to change the order. The hand is always going to be in the same place on the same frames.

If you had really complex character movement it could get tedious to set up, but that would be why most sprite-based games have very simple movements (and most people switched to using 3D which is infinitely easier to animate).