Sprite Groups

In this lesson, you’ll learn about the sprite.Group class, and add your Player and Enemy objects to them. You’ll create two different Group objects:

1. The first Group will hold every Sprite in the game.
2. The second Group will hold just the Enemy objects.

Here’s what that looks like in code:

82# Create the 'player'
83player = Player()
84
85# Create groups to hold enemy sprites and all sprites
86# - enemies is used for collision detection and position updates
87# - all_sprites is used for rendering
88enemies = pygame.sprite.Group()
89all_sprites = pygame.sprite.Group()
90all_sprites.add(player)
91
92# Variable to keep the main loop running
93running = True

When you call .kill(), the Sprite is removed from every Group to which it belongs. This removes the references to the Sprite as well, which allows Python’s garbage collector to reclaim the memory as necessary.

Now that you have an all_sprites group, you can change how objects are drawn. Instead of calling .blit() on just Player, you can iterate over everything in all_sprites:

114# Fill the screen with black
115screen.fill((0, 0, 0))
116
117# Draw all sprites
118for entity in all_sprites:
119    screen.blit(entity.surf, entity.rect)
120
121# Flip everything to the display
122pygame.display.flip()

Now, anything put into all_sprites will be drawn with every frame, whether it’s an enemy or the player.

For more information about the sprite.Group class, check out the pygame documentation.