The thing is you sort of need to write like this for the first draft of your first game. And Terraria is pretty ambitious. Considering most people struggle with BlackJack or Pong or Snake!
Given the choice between interviewing a student who had produced nothing but verbiage and one who had produced TerrariaClone, I would go with the latter without even thinking about it.
The AP class was mainly a self or group study class inside of a lower level programming class.
We didn't get as much directed study, but we basically were allowed to chose projects that interested us and spent a lot of time developing them and getting help, iterating, figuring it out.
We ended up doing only OK on the AP exam, but we had built a pretty impressive little java app by the end. A scrolling tile based map, enough network code to run a chat and let users join, and we had started building some game logic on top of our multiplayer game room. Very cool and informative, but not exactly what the AP exam was looking for.
A few of us spent the time working on our own real-time strategy game written in Java and using Anim8tor for 3d models. By the end of the year we had a map, artwork, and some network code to allow multiplayer. You could place buildings, select units, move, attack, etc.
My friend found the source on an old USB drive a couple years ago and we were able to get it running again. Some of the code was hilariously bad, but we were both impressed that we had been able to get that far and that it worked since we didn't really know what we were doing. Fun times :)
then even pong is pretty hard.
not with those O(N^2) loops it ain't