Flappy Bird Animation using Pygame

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 subfodler 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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