Chapter 4: Drawing and Animating Graphics

In this chapter, we will go beyond drawing simple shapes and discuss how to draw and animate pixel graphics seen in most games. This will make our game look much nicer and bring the game to life as the characters animate around the screen.

In game programming, a graphic or image that is drawn to the screen is known as a sprite, which can be anything from a single non-animated image, a player character with multiple frames of animation, or even the background image drawn behind other graphics on the screen.

We will start by showing how to load and draw a simple sprite instead of our square, and then animate the sprite to show movement. Next, we will move the sprite around the screen and the animation will change based on the direction the sprite is currently moving in.

And finally, we will create an enemy sprite for the player sprite to collide into as we build on our knowledge of collision detection.

So, we will cover the following...