How I learn programming by building an MMORPG from the ground up 7 times

Fang-Pen Lin
13 min readSep 3, 2019

Notice: This article is also published at my own blog and dev.to

It has been twenty years since I started programming. Today I want to share the story of how I learn to code by building an MMORPG from the ground up 7 times since I was 12 years old. Sounds crazy? Yep, that’s how I did it. It all starts with an MMORPG I like a lot while I was a kid, it’s called Lineage.

Screenshot of Lineage, from Lineage servers shutting down in the West, GameSpot

Back in my day, it was the most popular online game in Taiwan, and surely the most popular one among my classmates. The game was designed to always be exponentially harder to get to the next level from the previous one. As a 12 years old kid, I didn’t have time to get to the top level. So I talked to myself:

Well, since I cannot get to the high level in the game, why not make one myself? So that I can be the god in the game, I can do anything I want with by typing a command!

This motivation doesn’t sound creepy at all until I watched an episode of Black Mirror on Netflix.

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Fang-Pen Lin

Master Generalist 🌈 Software Engineer 💻, author of https://leanpub.com/rough-road, creator of https://zeroinbox.io, opinions are my own