The BMPStitch program is a good example of how it’s sometimes useful to write utility software that supports and aids your primary coding effort. I had no intention of writing something that combined animated image frames together into a single bitmap, but I ultimately decided that writing such a utility would save time and make the game development process easier. The code to manage 36 individual bitmap frames would probably include some type of ArrayList or other collection structure, and this would be more complex than having a single bitmap and some simple math that calculated x and y offsets. In the end, the extra utility code made the actual game code simpler.