With most of the sprites finished by one of our artists - Archie - I began the process of replacing all of the placeholders and primitives in our game with finalised assets. This primarily pertained to the player, conductor, and conductor's attacks, with a few key sprites cut to save time and improve the overall quality of each sprite by giving Archie extra time to allocate.
Some sprite implementations were easier than others. For example, I already had placeholder sprites for the player's attack, walk cycle, idle animation, and jump. As such, the code that controls these placeholders already exists too. It was simply a process of importing the sprite sheets and creating flipbooks to replace the placeholders. As for the conductor, they had yet to get any sort of placeholder sprite. I had to quickly implement a system that checks when the player is in the mirror dimension or not and display the correct conductor sprite. The conductor was originally going to have animations that linked to each of their four attacks, but we ultimately decided to cut this feature to save time and end up with less but higher quality idle sprites. Our main justification behind cutting this feature is that we would've had to make an animation for both of the conductor's forms - mirror and non-mirror - and we all agreed that there was too little time left to actually achieve this. Additonally, we ended up not having a proper animation for the conductor's gold rush (the column attack) done by our final day of gold standard. This was because Archie could only work on the sprites at home as the college computers did not have adequate software for creating pixel art sprites (Aseprite).
Much like the rest of gold standard's asset implementation, there weren't many issues to note with implementing all of the finished sprites. Most of the issues surrounding sprites came down to deadline restraints that caused us to cut certain animations that the conductor was going to have - such as the attack sprites for each of the conductor's forms. If we had realised sooner, we could've decided to create generic attack sprites for each form, giving the player some extra indication of an incoming attack (aside from the warning symbol that appears at their feet for two out of three of the conductor's attacks). While it is understandable that we decided to go with sprites for our game rather than 3D models (our only 3D modeller is Nathaniel, who also had to juggle that responsibility with being our producer), the fact that the only software capable of creating the sprites that Archie was comfortable with couldn't be installed and used on the college's computers was a massive downside that caused us to lose plenty of precious time, as he could only work on the sprites when not in college. If I were to redo this project from the ground up, I would request that either the college installed the appropriate software onto their computers (Aseprite), we find an alternative that can be used in college, or we bite the bullet and use 3D models. Overall, the actual implementation of the finished sprites was incredibly easy, but the issues surrounding the sprites as a whole leaves much to be desired.