Hi Fun for all, Yes, I supply all my sprites larger than what is normally used for games. People use them for cartoon animations not just games so it's important that there is a decent amount of resolution in them. It's easy to downscale a large image but it's impossible to upscale without quality loss so I try to place size somewhere in between.
Normally when downscaling you shouldn't lose quality. Have you checked the compression settings on your downscaling, what are the final pixel dimensions from a 15 percent downscale.? if you're trying to create a sprite that's 32 pixels by 32 pixels I'm afraid you may have to go with pixels art sprites. That being said this sprite is vector art so you should maintain a decent amount of quality either which way you resize.
Are you downscaling the frames or are you using the included spriter file to reexport or resize the rigged puppet? If you're using Spriter make sure you have image smoothing switched on.
I made a tool on my site to batch reduce lots of images. You can stuff all the frames into that and it will output the originals without compression.
https://www.gamedeveloperstudio.com/tools/bulk_image_resizer.php