Improving the game and the code

Take a look at these suggested enhancements for the Timber!!! project. You can see the enhancements in action in the Runnable folder of the download bundle:

• Speed up the code: There is a part of our code that is slowing down our game. It doesn't matter for this simple game, but we can speed things up by putting the sstream code in a block that only executes occasionally. After all, we don't need to update the score thousands of times a second!
• Debugging console: Let's add some more text so that we can see the current frame rate. Like the score, we don't need to update this too often. Once every hundred frames will do.
• Add more trees to the background: Simply add some more tree sprites and draw them in whatever position looks good (some nearer the camera and some further away).
• Improve the visibility of the HUD text: We can draw simple RectangleShape objects behind the score and the FPS counter. Black with a bit of transparency will look quite good.
• Make the cloud code more efficient: As we alluded to a few times already, we can use our knowledge of arrays to make the cloud code a lot shorter.

Take a look at the game in action with extra trees, clouds, and a transparent background for the text:

To see the code for these enhancements, take a look in the Timber Enhanced Version folder of the download bundle.