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What's the sensible thing to do when offered a choice between writing a paper or doing a creative project for a Gender in Science class' final? Offer to make a game expressing the themes of the class! And make all the art for it yourself, too, using an art program that you also wrote from scratch! That must be equivalent, roughly, to fifteen pages of analysis, right?
No. It... kind of isn't. And not in the way of being a deficit of expended effort. Still, it produced this game, The Scientific Method, and that process taught me a lot about programming, game design, and the importance of testing your exported program! That last one came in handy during work this summer, surprisingly enough.
Just an FYI: If you package a Java project as an executable .jar file, and you want to include, say, art assets in that .jar, you cannot access them as files. At all. So what works during development in your IDE breaks horribly when you export it; furthermore, exact pathing is a must, and you can't do this lovely little trick of generically grabbing the only file within a folder so that you can avoid having to rename new art assets constantly.
The original submission only discovered this fact fifteen minutes before it was due, so four hours later I gave up, had the idea that the mountain must be brought to Mohammed, and made it so that the user could specify the location of the art assets themselves. Very awkward, had to overhaul the project for an undesired design framework out of desperation.
Let a month or two go by, though, and suddenly the problem's been solved, the feature has been re-implemented, and I can finally share it widely without being annoyed at that design implementation! Now the problem is just to work on the actual gameplay, but I'm happy to share what I've got cause it's a lot, and I'm very happy with it.