So for my software engineering class we have to write a game in Java, and let me tell you, it has been a time.

The worst part so far has been the transition over to using a JLayeredPane, so that we actually have a background and a foreground. I offered to handle it, since I've done a bit with swing before now.

So I put together something that I thought should work, only to find that layered panes and layouts do NOT like to work together. So it was off to google...after sooo many hours of pouring over tutorials and javadocs I finally got the layers to draw...only to find that our Buttons had stopped working!

For some reason, putting the buttons inside a JPanel stopped them from actually informing their ActionListener (since the random test button I just added had actually still worked). So OF COURSE that meant I had to rework the buttons too, since their logic relied on that panel.

All in all, what should have been a relatively simple refactoring of our view was tranformed into almost a week's worth of frantic googling and pain through the magic of Java Swing.