Having great communication between your art team and your programming team is key if you wish to have smooth implementation of your graphics and animation.
Raster and vector graphics allow you to create and use very different styles of graphics, and also offer you different levels of performance.
Identify what tools you'll need up front so that you don't have to stop midway to add another component to your workflow.
Graphics and drawing techniques can give your game depth and life.
Setting up flexible, code-based techniques for implementing dynamic changes such as color shifts or tiling will save you a lot of work, keep operations consistent, and improve performance.
Taking the time to optimize your graphics will save you a lot of time and effort, and of course will improve your game's performance. Think about optimization at every stage of your game development from the actual drawing of the figures through the prep stage, when you situate your graphics and animations within Flash, convert them to symbols and movie clips, and ready them for the programmer.
