For design purposes, it is convenient to lay out the sprite on paper first. You can show the desired colors as numbers from 0 to 3. For example, the spaceship shown above might look like this: 0000122332210000 0001223333221000 0012223333222100 0001223333221000 0000122332210000 The next step is to convert the numbers 0-3 into binary numbers, which will be used to build the color descriptor words of the sprite data structure . the next section shows how to do this.