Questions with creating sprites in pygame - pygame

Question

So basically what I know how to do is add a player sprite (make a player class that inherits from pygame.sprite, etc...) this works for me.
What I would like to know how to do is iterate the creation of sprites and add them to the sprite group.
This is because I have a 2 dimensional array and I have a function that reads this and places the "tiles" accordingly in the 2d space, this is to create levels easier.
So what I want this function to do is create these sprites (I guess with a for loop that reads the array ?) and add them to do the group but this doesn't work so I have some questions first:
1)Can you create sprites outside of the init function in a class?
2)What really are sprites, is it a surface coupled to a rect ?
3)And finally do you have an idea of simply how to get this done: If I give you a 2d array, how would you make the function that reads this array and calculates the position (this is okay, I think I have it figured out) and most importantly, make sprites out of the given positions that can then be added to the sprites group.
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Can you create sprites outside of the init function in a class?
Sure.
What really are sprites, is it a surface coupled to a rect ?
If we talk about pygame's Sprite class: yes.
Such a sprite is basically a Surface (the image attribute) and a Rect (the rect
attribute). They work best together with pygame's Group classes.
And finally do you have an idea of simply how to get this done ....
Just create a nested loop to iterate over the array.
Here's a simple example:
import pygame
pygame.init()
TILESIZE = 64
class Actor(pygame.sprite.Sprite):
def __init__(self, color, pos):
super().__init__()
self.image = pygame.Surface((TILESIZE, TILESIZE))
self.image.fill(pygame.Color(color))
self.rect = self.image.get_rect(topleft = pos)
def main():
data = [
' YUB ',
' G ',
' B ',
' ',
' Y ',
' U ',
]
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((len(data[0]) * TILESIZE, len(data) * TILESIZE))
sprites = pygame.sprite.Group()
colors = {
'G': 'green',
'B': 'black',
'Y': 'yellow',
'U': 'dodgerblue'
}
x, y = 0, 0
for line in data:
for char in line:
if char in colors:
sprites.add(Actor(colors[char], (x * TILESIZE, y * TILESIZE)))
x += 1
x = 0
y += 1
while True:
events = pygame.event.get()
for event in events:
if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
pygame.quit()
return
sprites.update()
screen.fill((100, 100, 100))
sprites.draw(screen)
pygame.display.flip()
main()
You can find another example here.