Adding Our Player

Now on, we will start working on our game, let us start by adding our main player.

We will use olc::sprite to add our player, just think sprite as an imagebut before this let us initialize some member variables for our class.

class Game : public olc::PixelGameEngine
{
public:
    Game()
    {
        sAppName = "Space Warrior";
    }

    bool OnUserCreate() override
    {
        
        return true;
    }

    bool OnUserUpdate(float fElapsedTime) override
    {
        return true;
    }
private:
    float fPlayerPositionX = 185.0f;
    float fPlayerPositionY = 250.0f;
};

Nothing new, just added two variables to denote the player's X and Y coordinates in the screen.

Now download the image provided below (hover and right click), for our player. You can use any image you want

Loading Sprites

class Game : public olc::PixelGameEngine
{
public:
   bool OnUserCreate() override 
    {
        sprPlayer = std::make_unique<olc::Sprite>("../sprites/player.png");
        return true;
    }

   bool OnUserUpdate(float fElapsedTime) override
    {
        Clear(olc::BLACK);
        DrawSprite(fPlayerPositionX, fPlayerPositionY, sprPlayer.get());
        return true;
    }
private:
    float fPlayerPositionX = 185.0f;
    float fPlayerPositionY = 250.0f;

    std::unique_ptr<olc::Sprite> sprPlayer;
};

Don't get scared, sprPlayer is just a pointer, that is very safe to work with. sprPlayer holds a pointer to object of type olc::Sprite.

We have quite a few changes here, We added,

bool OnUserCreate() override
   {
        // sprites...
        sprPlayer = std::make_unique<olc::Sprite>("../sprites/player.png");
        return true;
    }

We simply initialized sprEnemy by passing filepath to

std::make_unique<olc::Sprite>(file_path);

Similarly, In the OnUserUpdate method, we added

bool OnUserUpdate() override
{
  DrawSprite(fPlayerPositionX, fPlayerPositionY, sprPlayer.get());
  return true;
}

We used DrawSprite method to draw the sprite on the screen, we passed in the position of the player and a pointer contained by sprPlayer, remember I said earlier sprPlayer holds a pointer to object of type olc::sprite, the get method just return that pointer.

To be on the same page, our main function should look like this

int main()
{
    Game game;
    if (game.Construct(450, 340, 4, 4))
        game.Start();

    return 0;
}

Now if you run this program you should see something like this:

Don't worry if you see some compiler warnings, we will deal with them later.

Next we will add some life to our player, i.e. we will add some movement to the player.