18. Sprite Sheets

In this chapter, you start building the first elements of the Penguin Pairs game. This game is quite a bit more complicated than the previous games. You can see this by looking at the number of game assets it uses. Just as you did in the Jewel Jam game, you use images containing several different sprites. This technique is used in many games. In the Jewel Jam game, you used it to store a strip of jewels in a single sprite. However, using strips isn’t always a good idea. Especially when an image contains many different sprites in a strip, the strip may become too long for the graphics hardware to handle. This can be solved by storing sprites in a sheet instead, consisting of multiple rows and columns. Figure 18-1 shows an example of such a sprite sheet.