Memory usage and making a beat'em up with some platforming

Good day everyone, I'm Magic Cancel and I have a lot of questions!

Long story short, I am working on a beat 'em up plat former type game. The way things are going, we got a digital painter for creating the world, but we're using flash and vectors to create the characters and their animations.

I was wondering if anyone knew some best practices for this in rgeards to keeping RAM and VRAM usage down.

While the level art is still underway we did encounter an issue with sprite creation. Our sprite creator provided me with some 512x512 animations, and when scaled down the character became distorted looking, just not pretty to look at. I've read that you can typically shrink things down with no loss, but that runs counter to my experience.

Another thread I read mentioned a good practice was to make stuff as large as possible and then shrink them down before putting them in their game (it was this thread: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/what-resolution-should-i-be-painting-sprites-in.225845/ ).

Any advice is appreciated, so thanks in advance!