July 26 - August 1
As the summer is ending, I am trying to wrap up my website and game. I like the changes I made last week, but I wanted to do a little more to make the game more complex. After some brainstorming, I decided to make some plants worth more points, but with the caveat that the player only has a few seconds to catch that plant. I looked through the impressively stocked Alice library and decided to use lilies for this purpose. I coded so that when the lily appears on screen, so does a counter which counts down from 5 to 0. If the player eats the lily in time, s/he receives 5 bonus point. Otherwise, it disappears and a regular fern appears.
The premise sounds simple enough, but I had a lot of trouble coding the countdown. Since I am really new to Java, I handn't encountered time functions before. Matt had done something like it for his game, so we switched projects one day: I helped him with his game, and he helped me with mine! Now my countdown is working beautifully!
