Just in Time for Halloween: Displaying Sprites

Many of us are gearing up for Halloween with ghoulish costumes, but we're taking a look at sprites of a different nature! In the spirit of Halloween, as well as game programming, what better a topic to explore than how to load and display sprites into your game?

Game sprites, for the uninitiated, are the graphic objects (or images) a player uses to represent himself in a game. Pacman is a sprite (as is Ms. Pacman) and so are the ships in Space Invaders. Of course sprites aren't limited to the classic video games. Nowadays, these graphics can be easily integrated into some pretty complex backgrounds.

If you think about it, these movable graphics aren't all that unlike their spooky counterparts--once you've got them drawn they can move about the screen on their own plane, even passing through other sprites. I wonder if the temperature drops when they do...