Tower Defense Game: Handling Sprites

Sprites are entities – usually graphical – that you draw on the screen. We’ll need quite a lot of them in our Tower Defense Game: projectiles, enemies, the vegetation that makes up the game play area, and the text for the HUD.

To complicate matters, they all require their own unique set of features to make our game feel complete and professional: our projectiles fly through the air, so they need to move and rotate as they go. When they explode on impact, they need to fragment into pieces, so we need to think about animations and collision detection. Our enemies need move and death animations, and they should smoothly walk along a path from the spawn to the escape point.

It’s time we look at how to build sprites in PyGame.