Going the extra mile

A functional game is far from a fully finished product. Sure, we have everything we wanted in the beginning, but it still leaves things to be desired, such as keeping track of the score and showing how many lives we have. At first, your main instinct might be to just add a bit of text somewhere on the screen that simply prints the number of lives you have left. You may even be tempted to do as little as simply printing it out in the console window. If that's the case, the purpose of this part is to change your way of thinking by introducing something that we will be using and improving over the course of this book: the textbox.

If that name doesn't really mean anything to you, simply imagine a chat window on any given communication application, such as MSN Messenger or Skype. Whenever a new message is added, it's added to the bottom as the older messages are moved up. The window holds a certain number of messages that are visible at one time. That's not only useful for...