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[robby12]

When using a program like illustrator to create vector art, do you have to convert it to a pixelated format like a png? If not, what do you export the image as?
Thank you for taking the time to read this.

[cynicalsandel]

For what use?

For video game assets, it depends. A lot of devs will export vector art to a raster format for performance, but others (I believe Guacamelee) use the actual flash files for animations.

If you are just creating an image that you want to display on the internet, it would make sense to export it to a raster format.

[Aik]

I just (sort-of) finished writing a parser for .svg files, so I guess you can do that (or find one - I'm sure there are plenty out there depending on what language you're working with). There are game libraries that work with 2D vector graphics out there, but they don't seem particularly popular (if we ignore Flash...).
Rasterising it is easy though. If you don't have a particular need to have vector graphics in-game, it's probably a good way to go.

[Greipur]

As previous posters mention there are some methods to implement SVG files in the game itself. In Unity for example there are plugins such as Simply SVG and SVG Importer (I haven't used any of them).

In my current project we use Illustrator for our interface and 2d objects to approximate our lowpoly 3d style in the environment. We make them as SVGs and then import them into Photoshop for simple resizing for a certain pixel resolution, and rasterization of course. If you haven't realised this already you can drag and drop vector objects from Illustrator into Photoshop, it's one of my favourite features in this workflow (though I'm still using CS6).