Unleashed is my FIRST major programming project, Java project, and 2D platformer game created way back in high school. Going into it I had limited knowledge of project organization and game development. Initially, I did not know what a game engine and double buffering was, just to give you an idea. I did not know how to use Slick2D or the LWJGL. Take the code itself with a grain of salt.
My friend Ben Siti and I entered a competition hosted by the Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) in which we had about a month to create a platformer with at least three levels and a score system. Ben did all the graphics and I wrote the code. Time was a HUGE constraint because we could only work on it in our free time. I had to teach myself game development theory and learn how to operate Slick2D and the LWJGL. After learning all this, we were two weeks in, Ben completed the graphics of the main character, and I was done writing the boilerplate game engine code.
The two weeks that followed were full of obstacles and "budget cuts". What's funny is we built this game, which is all about manipulating gravity, when we hadn't taken any physics courses yet. In the end, this mess of a project made us go far. We didn't win, but we learned a lot.