Summary

By learning how to take advantage of sprite shaping, you have added a new tool to your game development belt. If you're not so artistically minded (I'm certainly not), the ability to use a small set of tiles to create a diverse range of environments is hugely useful. Even if you are terrific at creating game art (lucky you!), sprite shaping can help bring your art to life in ways that weren't possible before.

Many games rely on a health system of some variety, and the knowledge gained by implementing the system in this chapter will be useful for a long time to come, no matter what genre of game you're working on (although there are some exceptions; a health system in most sports games wouldn't make much sense, for example). By building on this system by creating a custom health UI, you've laid the foundation for creating a dynamic UI for games in the future. While we focused on creating a health bar in this chapter, using the same principles...