The Funny Story About My First MMORPG That Generates Me 333 Dollars in the First Week
I did not know how to code when I started then you can do it with your hands too
You can make your own game, trust me!
I’ve walked that path before and I know you can do it. It’s a long story since I will tell you where this journey started.
When I was six, I lived with my parents in Thailand. My father was a soldier, so I live in a row house within the soldier’s resident zone. One day I had visited a brother-like neighborhood and see something interesting through the window. He was playing Contra with Famicom console but I did not see the console or joystick because I was short. Yeah, it’s normally for a six years old boy. However, that looked fun.
Then I asked him, “which channel you are watching?”
He did not tell me that was a game console back then, but he said it was channel 3!
Seriously, at that time I didn't know anything about the game console and ran to my house to turn on channel 3. Damn it, it’s the Twilight Show program right there. Maybe the brother misspoke about the channel, then I went to ask him again, he said his TV was on channel 3 right now but my TV might be the different one. (In fact, he was right. The game console at that time did not use an AV cable. So, his TV was on channel 3.)
I knew it. Some of the other channels were running advertisements, the anime-like program (Contra) might be running in one of those channels! Then I ran to my house again, tab on every button, and wait for Contra to be shown but I saw nothing.
It might be something else! So, I ran to his house again. But he was speaking with his friend in front of his house for a while and then gave him a white object. I didn’t have a chance to ask him then I asked my friend about it.
My friend said it’s a game console and brought me to a game rental shop. The best game console out there was Super Famicom. Yeah, Sony Play Station was not born at that time. Well, we played games together at that shop. For 5 baht ($0.16), we could play the Famicom or Mega Drive for 15 minutes. (or maybe 20 minutes, I can not remember precisely.)
I usually played action games with my friend and always suggested how to get those games better. My friend was annoyed and said, “GO TO MAKE GAME BY YOURSELF!”
That’s right! I had to make my own game! And that became my dream since then.
I do not know how to make a game
I have no clue how to make it. There is no lesson or even a book in Thailand. I found the first book that taught me how to develop games with Visual Basic when I was fifteen. It was too advance for a beginner like me. So, I did not understand anything but at least I knew that it was just programming and I can do it with Visual Basic.
The first game I developed is a 3x3 Tic-Tac-Toe. I made it in 5 hours without knowing how to loop. When I was 16, I registered to National Software Contest 2000 that I wanted to create Thai boxing Manager 2000. My proposal passed, they funded me 5000 baht for research and I had to finish it within 3 months.
I was a lazy boy out there. One month passed without any progress because I was studying. After semester break, I tried to learn from a book and develop my game for two weeks. I felt stressed then I played games and surfed the internet.
In that era, we connected to the internet through a modem with 32KB at maximum but 12KB is the best I could get from my internet service provider. I play around until I had 10 days left before the deadline. If I could not finish my project to a visible level, they would take that money back but I already spent them all.
I have no money to return! The only way to survive was getting things done!
But the problem was I could not return value from Combo List because the book I bought did not mention it. Damn, there was no google at that time and my teacher only knew how to code in Pascal. He could not help me and I could not find a solution in other books either.
Now a day we use Line to chat. Before that, it was the MSN era and before MSN, it was ICQ’s. That ICQ had a feature called White Page. It allowed us to find specific information about users such as hobbies. Yeah, I searched for people who liked programming. I needed to choose the target country and it will show only 100 users in the list. I started from a country with an A letter, asking them if they could code in Visual Basic. Most of them learned C programming language but never touch Visual Basic.
I found my lifesaver in the United Kingdom. He was an 18-years-old college student. After he finished his breakfast, he installed Visual Basic, tested the code, and sent it to me. That how I survived without Google.
My first MMORPG
When I was 26, I went to Japan, living on a mountain in Nagano. The internet’s speed was incredible compared to Thailand’s. So, I decided to learn how to create a web application and PHP is my choice.
I downloaded an ebook from the internet then started learning it. However, it was strange. The code I did was the same as the book said but I could not connect to SQL database.
After trying to find an answer, there was no solution to this issue. So, I asked my friend through email and then he asked, “Which version of PHP is in that book?” Damn it! I installed PHP5 on my device but read the PHP4 book!
Well. after taking the right dose, oops, the right book. I created my first MMORPG as a project learning base while I did not know any basics of HTML. Also, I did not learn HTML and CSS but observe them from the template. Through trial and error for a month, Legendora, my first web-based MMORPG was launched.
Paypal reported my income every day in the first week but wait. Did I code purchasing system myself? NO, I download it from the PHP class. It’s simple but worked.
Please note that I was using only PHP out there then a lot of bugs happened.
In the market, I did not prevent inputting negative numbers then someone cheated. They got money and items from the market for free by this loophole.
The funny is a battle of the Undead and Angel. Undead is a class that had a 25% chance to activate his drain life skill which draining 10% of the opponent’s current HP to himself. Angel also had the same rate to activate Healing skill to restore 20% of her current HP. (I did not remember the exact formula but I think it was something like this.)
My mistake was, I forgot to stop it at max HP. The user told me in a forum that he waited for their fight for half an hour and it did not likely to finish as both of them already had millions of HP. Angel healed, Undead drained, Angel healed, Undead drained and the loop kept going on without end.
Cool, right? (NO!)
After a week, my Paypal stopped reporting income. I thought they left because it’s buggy and I did not have the ability to solve this rotten app. Also, I was sick because I slept 4 hours a day all month. My game could not hold the ground anymore. So, I closed it.
People always said my game had high potential. Yeah, I am good at thinking but coding. The project might fail but I got the valuable experience and most of the things, I had achieved my dream to create my own game. It was fun and worth more than the money I got.
If you have your dream, then step out and chase it.
