Drawing a Sprite

Demonstrates how to draw a sprite by using the SpriteBatch class

Overview

In any game, drawing basic textures to the screen is essential knowledge, whether it is for menus and background images, to 2D game textures and characters. In this sample we will walk though the steps needed to load a texture and then render it on the screen.

End result

The output of this tutorial

Requirements

The following texture will be used to render to the screen.

Character Texture

Save it to your content project and name it "Character" (this name will used to reference it in the project).

Note

The tutorial assumes you have already created a new MonoGame project using one of the standard templates.

To draw a sprite on screen

Add the texture to your Content project, as detailed in HowTo Add Content.

Load the textures that will be used for drawing sprites in the Game.LoadContent method. In this case, the example uses the Content member to load a texture from the MonoGame Framework Content Pipeline.

Important

The texture must be in the project, with the same Name passed to ContentManager.Load. In this case the texture should be called "Character"!!

// The reference to the loaded sprite
private Texture2D spriteTexture;
// The position to draw the sprite
private Vector2 spritePosition;

protected override void LoadContent()
{
    // Create a new SpriteBatch, which can be used to draw textures.
    _spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice);
    spriteTexture = Content.Load<Texture2D>("Character");
    spritePosition = Vector2.Zero;
}

In the Game.Draw method, you will see a call to GraphicsDevice.Clear, which clears out the screen for the next frame.
After GraphicsDevice.Clear, call SpriteBatch.Begin on your SpriteBatch object to ready the next batch of textures to draw.
Call SpriteBatch.Draw on your SpriteBatch object, passing the texture to draw, the screen position, and the color to apply.

Tip

Color.White is used to draw the texture without any color effects.

When all the sprites have been drawn, call SpriteBatch.End on your SpriteBatch object.

protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime)
{
    GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue);

    // TODO: Add your drawing code here
    _spriteBatch.Begin();
    _spriteBatch.Draw(spriteTexture, spritePosition, Color.White);
    _spriteBatch.End();

    base.Draw(gameTime);
}

When run, you should now see the character drawn in the top-left of the screen.

Note

Actually, what you should see is the character drawn from the top-left of the screen. This is because (by default) the Top-Left corner of the sprite is the origin and the sprite is drawn from that position. The Animated Sprite example shows a simple way of offsetting the drawing of a sprite so that its middle is used as its origin instead.

Moving the sprite

To move the sprite, simply update the spritePosition to a new location, a quick and easy way to do this would be to detect when the arrow keys are pressed and change the position, like so:

    protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime)
    {
        if (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed || Keyboard.GetState().IsKeyDown(Keys.Escape))
            Exit();

        // TODO: Add your update logic here
        KeyboardState state = Keyboard.GetState();
        if (state.IsKeyDown(Keys.Right))
        {
            spritePosition.X += 1;
        }
        if (state.IsKeyDown(Keys.Left))
        {
            spritePosition.X -= 1;
        }
        if (state.IsKeyDown(Keys.Up))
        {
            spritePosition.Y -= 1;
        }
        if (state.IsKeyDown(Keys.Down))
        {
            spritePosition.Y += 1;
        }

        base.Update(gameTime);
    }

See How to detect input for more information on working with the various inputs that MonoGame supports.

Table of Contents

Drawing a Sprite

Overview

End result

Requirements

Note

To draw a sprite on screen

Important

Tip

Note

Moving the sprite

See Also

Concepts

Reference