Ben Silvis

If you haven’t already read the intro to this tutorial, you can find it here. In it we are introduced to sprite sheets, what they are, and some examples for where to use them.

One of those examples included combining many assets into a single sprite sheet. We can then extract a portion of this bitmap as its own unique element and use it as if we had loaded it separately. This kind of sprite sheet could be used for a variety of things. Maybe you’re designing an interface and you want to group similar UI elements in order to load them all at once. You could also find yourself developing a game in which there are many items for the player to collect and you need an easy way to organize them. The example below shows such a sprite sheet:

Images © Nintendo

Extracting Sprites

Like we mentioned above, this kind of sprite sheet would be the most useful to us if we had a way to extract an individual element from it. Thankfully with the help of some code and a little Triforce of Wisdom we can do just that.

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In this post I would like to introduce you to a custom class I wrote for working with sprite sheets. Now “what’s a sprite sheet?” you might ask. Well, while I’m not going to delve into much of the theory or the speed benefits from using them, you should know a few things:

A sprite sheet is a collection of sprites arranged into a single image, where each sprite represents a frame of an animation, an asset, a part of an image, or something to that extent. The idea of a sprite sheet has been utilized for a long time, namely in early gaming systems like Atari and Nintendo. In recent times they are most often used for efficient bitmap animation and are extremely useful in tile based games for level creation.

When loading external assets, many times you will find that it is much more time and code efficient to load many in one state – Not to mention that when used effectively this can save memory. Also, once you start animating many objects in a scene you will see a real performance spike when compared to regular Flash keyframe animation. Props to 8bitrocket for some useful info.

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Once you really get going into designing basically any kind of computer game – whether it be a 2-D platformer like Contra or even online video Poker – you are eventually going to need some kind of keyboard control besides general typing. Traditionally this could be the arrow keys or W,A,S,D for movement, spacebar for jumping or plasma-ray firing, R for retry or Q for quit, but really the level of control is up to you.

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So I’m sitting here, having recently misplaced my glasses, and it’s become quite apparent to me that I can’t see. Somehow in the midst of the unfortunate circumstances I find the inspiration for my first tutorial:

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