Sprites Overview

Sprites are small images used for characters, objects, and tiles in your game. PIGO8 loads sprites from a spritesheet.json file.

The Spritesheet

A spritesheet is a grid of small images (typically 8×8 pixels each). In PICO-8 style, the sheet is 128×128 pixels containing 256 sprites in a 16×16 grid.

Sprite IDs:
 0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
32 33 34 35 ...

spritesheet.json Format

{
  "version": "1.0",
  "description": "Game sprites",
  "sprites": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "x": 8,
      "y": 0,
      "width": 8,
      "height": 8,
      "flags": 0,
      "pixels": "0000000001111110011111100111111001111110011111100111111000000000"
    }
  ]
}

Sprite Fields

Creating Sprites

PIGO8 Editor

Run the built-in editor:

go run github.com/drpaneas/pigo8/cmd/editor

From PICO-8

If you have existing PICO-8 games:

go run github.com/drpaneas/parsepico -input game.p8 -output .

This extracts spritesheet.json and map.json.

Manual Creation

Create sprites programmatically or use image editors and convert to the JSON format.

Sprite Functions Summary