Although our game doesn't look vastly different from when we started this chapter, we have made some very important changes.

First, we implemented a text display to show the countdown timer, so that players of our game can see how much time they have remaining to complete the level. We also imported and configured a font and used the new font to make the countdown display more visually appealing.

We then implemented a system of tracking the number of lives that the player has left, and this was our first introduction to learning how game attributes can store information that can be carried across scenes.

The most visible change that we implemented in this chapter was to introduce a timer bar that reduces in size as the countdown decreases. Although very few instruction blocks were required to create the timer bar, the results are very effective, and are less distracting for the player than having to repeatedly look to the top of the screen to read a text display.

The main challenge for players of our game is to collect all the fruit actors in the allocated time, so we created an initialization event to count the number of fruit actors in the scene. Again, this event has been designed to be reusable, as it will always correctly count the fruit actors in any scene. We also implemented the instructions to test when there are no more fruit actors to be collected, so the player can be taken to the next level in the game when they have completed the challenge. A very important skill that we learned while implementing these instructions was to use actor values as Boolean flags to ensure that collisions are counted only once.

Finally, we created a new game attribute to keep track of our players' progress through the different levels in the game, and we'll be using this game attribute in Chapter 7, Polishing the Game, where we'll also be adding the finishing touches to our game!