In this blog post we are going to investigate how to animate a sprite when creating a video game using Python and the Pygame library. We will aim to create a frame-based animation using a rnage of graphics for our main sprite: a flappy bird.
Here is the animation we will recreate using Pygame
This animation contains 12 frames based on the following pictures:
Python Implementation
Below is the code to implement our sprite animation. The code consists of two files:
- bird.py contains the Bird class which will be used to load the pictures used in our animation
- main.py is the main frame based loop for the game.
For this code to work, you will also need to have a subfolder called images and save the above pictures of the flying bird.
bird.pymain.py
import pygame
WHITE = (255,255,255)
class Bird(pygame.sprite.Sprite):
#This class represents a bird. It derives from the "Sprite" class in Pygame.
def __init__(self, x, y):
# Call the parent class (Sprite) constructor
super().__init__()
# Load all the images for our animation and store these in a list
self.images = []
self.images.append(pygame.image.load('images/flappy-bird-1.png'))
self.images.append(pygame.image.load('images/flappy-bird-2.png'))
self.images.append(pygame.image.load('images/flappy-bird-3.png'))
self.images.append(pygame.image.load('images/flappy-bird-4.png'))
self.images.append(pygame.image.load('images/flappy-bird-5.png'))
self.images.append(pygame.image.load('images/flappy-bird-6.png'))
self.images.append(pygame.image.load('images/flappy-bird-7.png'))
self.images.append(pygame.image.load('images/flappy-bird-6.png'))
self.images.append(pygame.image.load('images/flappy-bird-5.png'))
self.images.append(pygame.image.load('images/flappy-bird-4.png'))
self.images.append(pygame.image.load('images/flappy-bird-3.png'))
self.images.append(pygame.image.load('images/flappy-bird-2.png'))
# Use the first image for our sprite
self.index = 0
self.image = self.images[self.index]
# Fetch the rectangle object that has the dimensions of the image.
self.rect = self.image.get_rect()
# Position the sprite on the screen at the given coordinates
self.rect.x = x
self.rect.y = y
def update(self):
# Increment the inex by 1 everytimne the update method is called
self.index += 1
# Check if the index is larger than the total number of images
if self.index >= len(self.images):
# Reset the index to 0
self.index = 0
# Update the image that will be displayed
self.image = self.images[self.index]
# Import the pygame library and initialise the game engine
import pygame
from bird import Bird
pygame.init()
# Define some colors
BLUE = (50,150,235)
# Open a new window
size = (700, 500)
screen = pygame.display.set_mode(size)
pygame.display.set_caption("flappyBird")
#Instatiate a Bird object and set its initial position at (x=220, y=120)
flappyBird = Bird(220,120)
#This will be a list that will contain all the sprites we intend to use in our game
all_sprites_list = pygame.sprite.Group()
# Add our flappyBird object to the list of sprites
all_sprites_list.add(flappyBird)
# The loop will carry on until the user exits the game (e.g. clicks the close button).
carryOn = True
# The clock will be used to control how fast the screen updates
clock = pygame.time.Clock()
# -------- Main Program Loop -----------
while carryOn:
# --- Main event loop
for event in pygame.event.get(): # User did something
if event.type == pygame.QUIT: # If user clicked close
carryOn = False # Flag that we are done so we exit this loop
elif event.type==pygame.KEYDOWN:
if event.key==pygame.K_x: #Pressing the x Key will quit the game
carryOn=False
# --- Game logic should go here
all_sprites_list.update()
# --- Drawing code should go here
# First, clear the screen to blue (sky).
screen.fill(BLUE)
#Now let's draw all the sprites in one go. (For now we only have 1 sprite!)
all_sprites_list.draw(screen)
# --- Go ahead and update the screen with what we've drawn.
pygame.display.flip()
# --- Limit to 60 frames per second
clock.tick(60)
#Once we have exited the main program loop we can stop the game engine:
pygame.quit()
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