Pygame character sprites, code included.

Pygame's eternal problem: the hero is a rectangle

Pygame is where first games get built — and lately where an enormous number of vibe-coded games get built, because an AI assistant can write a complete Pygame loop in one response. What no assistant can do is draw a character worth looking at, let alone one that looks like you. So the project ships with pygame.draw.rect where the hero should be.

This pack replaces the rectangle with a real character forged from a photo — 16 pre-cut transparent PNGs in direction-named folders, no spritesheet math, no slicing code. The naming is literal: frames96/down/down_01.png through down_04.png, then left/, right/, up/.

The whole loader and animator, for real

Pages that say "just a few lines!" and never show them are a genre. Here are the actual lines:

DIRS = ("down", "left", "right", "up")
walk = {d: [pygame.image.load(f"frames96/{d}/{d}_{i:02d}.png").convert_alpha()
            for i in (1, 2, 3, 4)] for d in DIRS}
facing, walk_ms = "down", 0

# inside your game loop, after handling input:
dt = clock.tick(60)                       # ms since last frame
moving = dx != 0 or dy != 0
walk_ms = walk_ms + dt if moving else 0
frame_i = (walk_ms // 135) % 4 if moving else 0   # frame 0 = neutral pose
screen.blit(walk[facing][frame_i], player_rect)

Set facing from your input handling ("left" when dx < 0, and so on) and that's the entire animation system: a dict, a timer, one blit. The 135ms cadence matches the pack's own walk GIFs, and frame 0 of every direction is the neutral standing stance — the pack's columns run neutral / left-step / neutral / right-step — so idling is free.

Why the frames behave

Because every frame sits centered with feet on a shared baseline, your Rect-based collision keeps working whichever way the character faces — no per-frame offsets, no hitbox drift. Prefer one image? The 4×4 sheets (sprite-sheet-96-transparent.png, rows down/left/right/up) are in the ZIP too, and Surface.subsurface cuts them at exact 96 or 48px cells.

From a photo, not a prompt

→ your sprite

The character is a specific real person — you, a friend, whoever's photo you upload — kept recognizable at sprite size. For a learning project or a gift game, that's the difference between "a character walks" and "I walk."

What's in the $5 pack

One-time $5, no account, 3 free retries, money-back if a pack fails QA (handled manually during beta).