Creating Sprites

Make a 2D Side-Scroller Game With PyGame Christopher Bailey 08:46

In this lesson, you’ll create the player as a sprite. Here’s how you use Sprite objects with the current game to define the player. Insert this code after line 18:

Python
      
    
# Define constants for the screen width and height
SCREEN_WIDTH = 800
SCREEN_HEIGHT = 600

# Define a Player object by extending pygame.sprite.Sprite
# The surface drawn on the screen is now an attribute of 'player'
class Player(pygame.sprite.Sprite):
    def __init__(self):
        super(Player, self).__init__()
        self.surf = pygame.Surface((75, 25))
        self.surf.fill((255, 255, 255))
        self.rect = self.surf.get_rect()

# Initalize pygame
pygame.init()

You need to remove lines 59 to 72, which included creating the previous surf object and displaying it. Those lines will be replaced with displaying the new player sprite. You also will be changing the background screen to be black. Here are the all the changes you will make during this lesson:

Python
      
    
# Import the pygame module
import pygame

# Import pygame.locals for easier access to key coordinates
# Updated to conform to flake8 and black standards
from pygame.locals import (
    K_UP,
    K_DOWN,
    K_LEFT,
    K_RIGHT,
    K_ESCAPE,
    KEYDOWN,
    QUIT,
)

# Define constants for the screen width and height
SCREEN_WIDTH = 800
SCREEN_HEIGHT = 600

# Define a Player object by extending pygame.sprite.Sprite
# The surface drawn on the screen is now an attribute of 'player'
class Player(pygame.sprite.Sprite):
    def __init__(self):
        super(Player, self).__init__()
        self.surf = pygame.Surface((75, 25))
        self.surf.fill((255, 255, 255))
        self.rect = self.surf.get_rect()

# Initialize pygame
pygame.init()

# Create the screen object
# The size is determined by the constant SCREEN_WIDTH and SCREEN_HEIGHT
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((SCREEN_WIDTH, SCREEN_HEIGHT))

# Instantiate player. Right now, this is just a rectangle.
player = Player()

# Variable to keep the main loop running
running = True

# Main loop
while running:
    # Look at every event in the queue
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        # Did the user hit a key?
        if event.type == KEYDOWN:
            # Was it the Escape key? If so, stop the loop.
            if event.key == K_ESCAPE:
                running = False       
        # Did the user click the window close button? If so, stop the loop.
        elif event.type == QUIT:
            running = False

    # Fill the screen with black
    screen.fill((0, 0, 0))

    # Draw the player on the screen
    screen.blit(player.surf, player.rect)

    # Update the display
    pygame.display.flip()

For more information about the Sprite class from the pygame documentation, and additional information on sprites and using inheritance with super(), check out the following resources:

For more information about the RGB color model, check out the following resources:

00:00 Welcome to Section 3. In this lesson, you’re going to start creating some sprites. I’m going to take you back a little bit, though, to think about the goals of the game.

00:07 You’re going to create a player object that avoids incoming obstacles. It’s going to start on the left side of the screen, and then obstacles are going to randomly appear on the right and move left in a straight line. The player is going to be able to move up, down, right, and left and avoid those obstacles.

00:24 We’ve got to have it so that the player doesn’t move off the screen. And then the game ends when the player is hit by an obstacle or when the user closes the window.

00:33 What I want to focus on for sprites is that there’s going to be a lot of obstacles. Not only is there going to be a player on the screen, but all these obstacles coming at the player. And for that, you’re going to use sprites. A sprite is a 2D representation of something on the screen. It could be something as simple as this rectangle, like out of the game Pong, to something much more advanced—still 2-dimensional, like you’ve seen in many video games. And pygame provides a Sprite class.