Working With Sprite Sheets
I’ve been playing video games for as long as I can remember. My first ever game console was the Super Nintendo (SNES) and my first video game was Donkey Kong Country. I remember the first time playing it, I was fascinated by the characters and animations.
I was always curious how video game characters got their animations when they were idling, moving, attacking, jumping, etc. It turns out one of the main methods of animating game sprites was the use of a sprite sheet.
What is a sprite sheet?
A sprite sheet is a single image file that contains multiple smaller images of a game sprite. In the sprite sheet below, the image contains multiple smaller images of Mario. Each row of the sprite sheet has Mario doing a different action in both directions. If you read it from left to right, the first 5 sprites are Mario running left, and the next 5 are running right:
Row 1: Mario running
Row 2: Mario in the air, ducking, looking up, and jumping
Row 3: Preparing to run and throwing up the peace sign
Row 4: Running
You get the point by now. Each row (or column) has a different animation. To get that animation in the game, you play the frames in order at a consistent rate so it looks animated. So to make Mario look left, we would get frames 1 and 2 on the first row. To make Mario look right and jump we would use frames 9 and 10 on the second row.
