In this lesson, you’ll replace all those boring white rectangles with some cooler images that will make the game feel like an actual game.

Earlier, you learned that images on disk can be loaded into a Surface with some help from the image module. For this tutorial, we made a little jet for the player and some missiles for the enemies. You’re welcome to use this art. You can click the link below to download the art used in this tutorial:

Download

Sample Code (.zip)

422.6 KB

Before you use images to represent the player and enemy sprites, you need to make some changes to their constructors. The code below replaces the code used previously:

Python
      
    
# Import pygame.locals for easier access to key coordinates
# Updated to conform to flake8 and black standards
from pygame.locals import (
    RLEACCEL,
    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 the Player object by extending pygame.sprite.Sprite
# Instead of a surface, use an image for a better-looking sprite
class Player(pygame.sprite.Sprite):
    def __init__(self):
        super(Player, self).__init__()
        self.surf = pygame.image.load("images/jet.png").convert()
        self.surf.set_colorkey((255, 255, 255), RLEACCEL)
        self.rect = self.surf.get_rect()

Here’s what similar changes to the Enemy look like:

Python
      
    
# Define the enemy object by extending pygame.sprite.Sprite
# Instead of a surface, use an image for a better-looking sprite
class Enemy(pygame.sprite.Sprite):
    def __init__(self):
        super(Enemy, self).__init__()
        self.surf = pygame.image.load("images/missile.png").convert()
        self.surf.set_colorkey((255, 255, 255), RLEACCEL)
        self.rect = self.surf.get_rect(
            center=(
                random.randint(SCREEN_WIDTH + 20, SCREEN_WIDTH + 100),
                random.randint(0, SCREEN_HEIGHT),
            )
        )
        self.speed = random.randint(5, 20)

For more information about loading images and RLEACCEL, check out the following resources from the pygame documentation:

Sprite Images