Sprites – importing and configuration

A sprite is a dedicated 2D object type in Unity. It lets you import a flat, regular texture for displaying a scene as if it were a cardboard prop or billboard. Sprites are useful for animated characters and props, such as the playable character in a side-scrolling platformer. 2D sprite animation works much like traditional flip-book animation, where key frame sketches are drawn on the pages of a book, one frame per page, and are played back to create animation by quickly turning the pages and observing the effect. There are two methods of importing and configuring animated sprites for your game, and this section covers both of them. The sprite objects used here are included in this book's companion files in the Chapter02/assets folder. So, open the assets and follow along with me. Let's start by considering two methods of importing sprites: importing individual sprites and importing a sprite atlas.