Introducing sprite sheets

First, let's whet your appetite by looking into the future of using sprite sheets, which allow you to create animations that look like this:

From our previous experience with SFML, we know that a sprite is essentially an image that can be moved around, cropped, scaled, and rotated just to mention a few options. A sprite sheet, on the other hand, is a texture that contains multiple sprites. From the image above, you can see the player is moving left and his animation is progressing. Each frame of the player's animation is stored in a sprite sheet, which is being accessed and cropped in order to represent a single sprite. This is what a small part of it looks like as a texture:

The way sprites are laid out can differ from game to game. It depends on the size constraints of a particular project, as well as the specifics of game-play. The format of the sprite sheet above is just what works the best here and is by no means the "perfect design."

Why would we want to use...