Chapter 6. Managing and Displaying Information

The gameplay mechanics are in place, we've added some nice visual effects, and our game is starting to look great, but there is still an important element missing; players of our game have no indication of how they are progressing. We need to let our players know how well (or badly) they are doing, otherwise there will be no incentive for them to continue playing the game!

There are many different pieces of information that might be useful to a player during gameplay, but we need to be careful not to overwhelm them, otherwise they'll be distracted from the game. Currently, we are keeping track of the time that is available for the player to complete the task of collecting all the fruit, but we're also going to be adding a count of the lives that the player has left.

In order to present this information to the player, we need to display it on the screen, but we're not only going to implement text messages for our players to read — we're also going...