Hello, I'm working on a game where my character needs to be able to have different weapons. For that I think that somehow overlaying the weapon over the moving sprite would be the correct choice, but I'm not sure about how could I do this.

Assuming my Character spritesheet looks like this:

And my preliminar weapon spritesheet ( haven't decided on a fixed square size for the weapon yet ), looks like this:

How would you make the overlay to set the weapon correctly over the character hand for each of his frames? I know that one way would be just to have a weapon frame the same size as my character sprites, and overlay those too, but I think that if the game has way too much weapons (say 15 different kinds of one hand weaps) this could get pretty insane ( having one weapon sprite sheet the same size as the character sprite sheet for each type of weapon )

Do you guys have any advice on how to implement this? (supporting overlaying the weapon sprites over the character sprites)

Thanks!