DYNO In terms of sprites and animations, they're automatically generated into an atlas, which is basically a PNG file with all of the frames in it. However, for ease of access/use, the frames are separated in the game files, which means that you only have to load up smaller sprites and not an entire atlas in order to get the sprites/frame or edit it. Something like a GIF is not going to help, due to detail often being removed during the compression process that GIFs go through. GIFs also don't really like translucency and commonly remove stuff like shadows or shading on sprites.