How to import a sprite sheet into Godot.

What you need before you start

This walkthrough is written against Godot 4 (with a Godot 3 translation note below) and any evenly-gridded walk sheet — the running example is a 4×4 sheet whose rows are down, left, right, up, four frames per row, like the ones PixelForge forges from photos. Godot's sprite-sheet story is different from Unity's or GameMaker's: nothing gets "sliced" on disk. The sheet stays one PNG, and a SpriteFrames resource points animations at grid cells inside it. Once that clicks, the whole job is: keep the pixels crisp, point SpriteFrames at the grid, name four loops, play them from input.

Import the sprite sheet into Godot 4

Drag your sprite-sheet-96-transparent.png into the project's res:// folder in the FileSystem dock. By default Godot renders textures with linear filtering, which smears pixel art into a blur the moment it is scaled. In Godot 4 this is fixed with a property, not an import flag (if you're hunting for the Godot 3-era Import-tab Filter option — it's gone):

Slice the sheet in AnimatedSprite2D

Now turn the single image into 16 named frames using AnimatedSprite2D and a SpriteFrames resource — Godot's built-in flipbook for sprite-sheet animation.

1. Add an AnimatedSprite2D node to your scene.
2. With it selected, open the Inspector, find the Sprite Frames property, click it, and choose New SpriteFrames. A SpriteFrames panel docks at the bottom of the editor.
3. In that panel, click Add frames from a Sprite Sheet (the grid icon) and open your PNG. The slicer dialog opens.
4. Set Horizontal to 4 and Vertical to 4. The preview snaps to a 4×4 grid of 16 cells.

Build the four directional animations

One sheet, four loops. In the SpriteFrames panel you create one animation per direction and feed it the right row of the grid.

1. Rename the existing default animation to walk_down.
2. In the slicer, click the four cells of the down row (the top row on a PixelForge sheet) and press Add N frames.
3. Back in the panel, click + to add walk_left, then re-open the slicer and add that direction's row. Repeat for walk_right and walk_up.
4. For each animation set Speed (FPS) to about 8–10 and switch Loop on so the walk cycle repeats. Optionally set one as Autoplay to preview it in the editor.

Play the walk cycle from input

Attach a script to a CharacterBody2D (with the AnimatedSprite2D as a child) and drive the right animation from the player's input. This is the standard Godot 4 top-down pattern — read a direction, set velocity, call move_and_slide(), and play() the matching loop.

extends CharacterBody2D

const SPEED = 90.0
@onready var anim = $AnimatedSprite2D

func _physics_process(_delta):
    var dir = Input.get_vector("ui_left", "ui_right", "ui_up", "ui_down")
    velocity = dir * SPEED
    move_and_slide()

    if dir == Vector2.ZERO:
        anim.stop()
    elif abs(dir.x) > abs(dir.y):
        anim.play("walk_right" if dir.x > 0 else "walk_left")
    else:
        anim.play("walk_down" if dir.y > 0 else "walk_up")

Input.get_vector("ui_left", "ui_right", "ui_up", "ui_down") returns a normalized direction from the built-in arrow-key actions (in Godot 4, move_and_slide() uses the node's velocity — you do not pass it in). The if/elif/else picks whichever axis dominates so the sprite shows one clean direction at a time and calls, e.g., $AnimatedSprite2D.play("walk_down"). Press F6 to run the scene and walk around.

That's the whole import

Import crisp → add AnimatedSprite2D → New SpriteFrames → Add frames from a Sprite Sheet at 4×4 → name walk_down / walk_left / walk_right / walk_up → play() from input. Same steps for an attack or idle sheet later — just more rows, more animations.