[Archelaos]

> so it's much easier to create for many different resolutions. Even if the automatic conversion to pixels wasn't perfect, wouldn't polishing them after conversion be a lot less work?

Different resolution demand different solutions. For example, if an artist uses a very low resolution such as 16x16 pixels for a character sprite, he will often favour an excessively large head because only then will he have enough pixels for his facial expressions. Likewise it does not make sense to use too many different colours in such a resolution. In contrast, if the arist wants to use more "realistic" sprites, she or he would probably choose a higher resolution with a larger colour palette from the start. So basically one is designing for a specific pixel-resolution and instead of adjusting the pixel-resolution to a screen-resolution one just scales the pixels themselves into little boxes when showing them on higher screen-resolutions.