Different sorts of sprite sheets

There are different sorts of sprite sheets. See some examples below.

Multiple postures on a single sprite sheet

A sprite sheet with different "sprite" sets that correspond to different "postures": this is the case for the walking woman we just saw in the previous lesson. This sprite sheet contains 8 different sets of sprites, or postures, each corresponding to a direction. In this example, each posture comprises exactly 13 sprites, aligned in a single row across the sprite sheet.

One posture per sprite sheet

Some sprite sheets have a single sprite set, spreading over multiple lines; like this walking robot:

This is an example that you will see a lot around the Internet, in many sprite sheets. For the full animation of the robot, we will need multiple sprite sheets: one for each posture.

As another example, here is the "jumping robot" sprite sheet:

Whereas the walking robot posture is made of 16 sprites, the jumping robot needs 26!

Hybrid sprite sheets

You will also find sprite sheets that contain completely different sets of sprites (this one comes from the famous Gridrunner IOS game by Jeff Minter):

So, when we think about writing a "sprite engine", we need to consider how to support different layouts of sprite sheet.