File types for unique illustrated style

[gimmeadog]

Im an illustrator making a flash game that uses large scale, fully illustrated backgrounds. The most important thing for me is to be able to maintain my style, but I'm having a difficult time figuring out which file type to use and finding that file size vs.in-game-performance balance. My style can be done in vector, but I worry that the size of the images and the overhead of the game functions would bring it to a crawl. I was hoping to get some expert opinions on what file types to use (about 25% of the images will have transparency)

I did a quick test on my own and it seemed like GIF32 and PNG8 were the way to go, but Im not confident in that... so here is a small example of the style I work in:



Many thanks!

[gimmeadog]

And here is a fake screengrab from the game:

[skewq]

i think that gifs are smaller filesize, but pngs look better, also look into flashes image compression in flash symbol library, its pretty good, and you can see how it will look with what quality settings instantly. Another thing, if the images are static, you can use vectors and then set the container symbol property "cacheAsBitmap" to true, that will make flash draw those vectors only once, not every frame, this is not very efficient for animations however.