This Video Game Started My Career
Video games are a form of entertainment more productive than watching TV shows. A single title gave me a first taste of programming. I was 13 years old and I loved it.
Then, a friend and I started a project for this video game. It quickly became an entrance door to the wider world of computers and information technologies. It was the starting point of the career I’m still pursuing many years later.
Let me tell you how it started.
We could create our own adventures
I used to play video games with my friends and my sister. It’s hard to remember all the details, but I think it is one of my friend’s older brother who introduced us to Neverwinter Nights. It was developed by BioWare and published in 2002.
Neverwinter Nights is set in a fantasy world. It’s quite similar to Tolkien’s universe, filled with agile halflings, robust dwarves and giant spiders. On the top of that, it was a multiplayer game. The community of players was passionated and wanted to turn the game into something bigger … because we could.
Indeed the game included the Aurora toolset that allow us to create custom content. The toolset enjoyed great popularity among the modding community, with over a thousand fan-made modules produced in it within half a year after the release of the game.
The Aurora was nothing less than a full game engine. It is a tool that game developers build first in order to facilitate the development of one or many games.
After long hours of playing, my friend and I found enough ressources to have fun with the game engine. It was easy for us to create our own adventures. We could create a dungeon or a swamp and place monsters, traps and of course … treasures.
All of this was absolutely exciting, but the tool came with something even more thrilling. (Well, in my opinion.)
We could customize everything
The game engine is set with the default rules and properties of the game. For example fire dragons are vulnerable to ice spells, and vampires are afraid of blessed weapons. But what if we want to create a magical frog with special abilities?
The Aurora toolset came with a Script Editor that allow the players to implement (most of) the things. Throw an arrow to that magical frog, and the monster could deflect it and throw it back to you, filled with poison.
If you have technical knowledge, you can notice that the syntax of the script above is very similar to the famous C programming language. It was the first taste of programming in my life. I loved it because I could modify the game as much as I wanted. Imagination was the only limit.
Coding was a whole new universe as exciting as playing video games. My interest in programming grew up quickly. I perfected my skills with online tutorials. I recently found my old messages on OpenClassrooms. I was 14 and I was asking for a code review after I implemented a version of the string.h library 🤓
We wanted to start our own server
After thousands of hours of playing, modding and coding, my friend and I wanted to make our own place in the game’s vibrant community. We started to work to launch our server, with our handmade module and our community.
It was a mix of passion, bravery and chaos. The project failed quickly, but we acquired knowledge and new skills on the way.
First mistake, we started with unnecessary work. Indeed, we wanted to add new models for weapons so we played around with 3D modeling softwares. That was a real pain. All we could achieve were ugly, low-poly (in the bad sense of the word), 100% grey swords. We didn’t even take time to look at texturing.
Second mistake, we skipped the Game design work. We started to build the universe directly in the game engine, without any specification. So we had no way to estimate the amount of work that was done, and the amount left to do.
Despite we were teenagers, we had the necessary technical skills to build something great. We needed some sort of management skills.
The project let me learn about a new aspect of programming and computers. It was a time when Facebook pages and groups were not so famous, or maybe they simply didn’t exist yet. In order to build a community we had to create a website and a forum.
That’s when I encountered the PHP programming language. It’s very different from the C programming language. This language is widely used to create websites. So it led me to learn about databases and IT networks.
This video game was just the beginning
Thus our project stopped, but it was fine, we continued to play together in Neverwinter Nights. For my part, my interest in hacking and programming computers was just starting. I had no roadmap for learning. I found a topic, I learned it. I found myself enjoying cryptography, compiling my own Linux (Gentoo) and messing up with computer hardware.
In retrospect it’s clear that my love for programming has its roots in video games. I did code some parts of the games I loved in my childhood. Below are some examples.
Most of the people of my age had a Game Boy. It’s how we discovered Pokemon. But I think I spent more time on Tetris, and years later I coded my own.
We could take the Game Boy everywhere with us, but the PlayStation was staying home. The Final Fantasy were my favorite titles. The best memory is that I owned only one of the game, so I had to go to friends’ place to play the others.
I ended up programming the Tetra Master. It’s a minigame of cards from Final Fantasy IX. I actually didn’t finish it because I found that someone already did a better job. She or he made one playable on a website. It was more impressive than the solo game I was coding.
One last project I loved. I programmed the graphical part of a 2D game engine similar to RPG Maker. We could create our own maps. Of course a real game engine would offer more features, such as audio, visual effects and some sorts of gameplay mechanisms.
What now?
I hoped you liked to dig into my teenager’s life. A normal guy coding programs because he liked video games is clearly not as impressive as Bill Gate’s debut. Now I would like to hear you telling me:
What was your past time when you were a teenager?
Some are playing football all day, some are programming 🤖 Of course passions and goals do change over time. It’s a relationship with its ups and downs.
I’m now in a big up moment again thank to great colleagues. I’m now determined to follow the promises of information technologies in Internet, immersive technologies, blockchains and artificial intelligence. I’m also thinking to start writing about them and their impact for businesses and society as soon as I’ve started my new job.
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You may have a look at my previous collection of articles 12 Weeks Learning How to Become a Business Developer.
