Sprite rambling

Bounding sprite.

In an isometric game (tilted at angle everything is parallel and no perspective(faux perspective)) characters or objects might be on a little tile of its own with a transparent background called a sprite. If its animated or rotates about it will have a frame for each of these animations in each rotation. Often these will be modelled in 3d  and rendered out into the frames and collated into an array or sheet so the programmers can refer to it with their programs easily.

The design limitation here is the placement of the character in the tile so that as it rotates about to look or move in different directions it appears to pivot naturally(and not a funny picture being rotated at an unusual offset).  Generally this means the character or creature is centred to the sprite, but it can effectively half the size of sticky out bits like guns or tails. Also it can limit the animation you can do without programmerly help(like things rearing up or jumping .

If you have made the character small in relation to the sprite it can make some gameplay programming tricky with  things like collision and pathfinding. Basically when trying to quickly figure out if a character can fit through a door you might use the size of the sprite for example- so you'll send your player into a fit when they see their character going the long way because the programming thinks they won't fit through a gap that visually they could easily manage. (also you might have a custom specified collision radius to avoid this)