How I got interested in coding

I have been always wanted to be a programmer of some sort since I graduated from Middle School.

Started with modifying games

I was hooked to this one game called Ragnarok. A friend of mine introduced me to this game when I just started Middle School. We ditched class together just to play this game. I have started playing it, before it become a free to play game (with in game purchase of course!) It was a subscription based game.

Since it's a subscription based game, I downloaded the offline version of it and played it in my (well, tbh. family shared) PC back home. The offline version allows me to try various build without paying the premium, so whenever I go online, I don't waste the time to learn stuff. Time is money guys! It's subscription based game!

Aaaand that's where I started to find that you can actually tweak stuff in the game. Just by editing some values with notepad, you can make the weakest monster stronger, change the behaviour of certain skills, change the drop rate, etc. At the back of my mind, I realized that behind of everything you see, the beautiful graphics, the awesome skills your swordman use to kill the next poring "Magnum Break!", everything is made with these files behind it.

Then I continue to tweak further, changing the .gfx files to modify the animation, sprites, etc.

Sometimes I tweak the online version just for fun, switching sprites. I don't remember correctly when I realized that some stuffs are server based and some stuffs are locally saved.

Hacking games / cheating become kind of second nature after that. I played Xian online and browsing through the cheating section, found out that the game actually allows you to modify the battle session. If you don't know what Xian is, look it up, basically the battle scene is played out in a new session different from the world map, much like J-RPG game. And while battle, it is actually locally happening, and when it finished then the game send data to the server, telling that you already finished the battle and the results. You can even spawn enemies, change the value of your exp before the game sends the package to the server.

I also tried openkore, a bot program for ragnarok that let's a code to run the game for you while you enjoy yourself with a bag of chips and watching doraemon. Well maybe that's just me. But yeah, this is where things are getting more interesting for me since it's kind of where I started to learn conditionals and syntax.

It is pretty easy to read (the code) because it was made for people who don't really know coding to tweak how the bot will automate your gameplay. I will post an example and images maybe someday so you can understand what I mean if you have never tried botting in Ragnarok.

And of course I have to mention Skyrim! Modding games are fun! There are tons of game you can find contributor to mod your games. Usually the developers have open sourced the game mechanics for people to write codes on top of it to mod them. Or maybe people just tweak the game, reverse engineering the code. Don't starve and cities skylines also have a great modding community.

Long story short, through gaming and cheating (and exploiting bugs) you can actually start to learn how to code and see the effects right through! Because I was just changing a fully packaged program and I can see the effect happening immediately in the game.

How do I got into architecture? That's for another story!