How I Got Into Programming
Written: 5/3/2011 - 5/4/2011
After watching a interview of notch(the creator of minecraft), I created this entry to archive my programming journey into digital history so I or no one could possibly forget and for readers to understand my experience as a programmer. Its personally funny to me because I wanted to become a lawyer first before I decided to become a game designer.This transition started with my Nintendo DS lite I got for Christmas in 2007. I got a few games for it but one really stood out to me, "Pheonix Wright: Ace Attorney." If you havent played this game its gameplay genre is a mix of a visual novel but also click and point mystery lawyer game. Itstead of just selecting text phrases, the game needed you to sumbit evidence and examine crime scenes and evidence to find clues and logic to use in court(Link). I was amazed by the quality of the story, music, and how they had responses for every little interaction(which i now understand are scripted responses) in the game. after beating this game, which had an amazing ending( you should pick it up if you haven't played it), I started to notice that I haven’t heard too many great stories about lawyers in real life so I wanted to create that story.
The next year I went on a summer trip with my friend. before we left, we stopped at Walmart to pick up anything we needed. so naturally we stopped in the game department were i found a DS cartridge called “Games n Music”(Link). This was my first step into programming. after spending most of the summer looking into ways to develop I found DS GameMaker (Link). This studio was like the PC program Game Maker but not the same. The program has dependencies , and really depended on Palib(Link). The main reason i had so much trouble was i had to configure the ds hombrew compiler just for Palib which gave me linker errors when I tried to compile other programs.
I decided to use Palib itself and set out to learn C++. But due to poor documentation about Palib and DevkitArm(Link) I abandoned DS homebrew development. In the months to come i found out that games could be made for the PC(for free). I searched into this option and the first thing i found in my google search were game maker tutorials until I youtubed “the game development process” and found a channel named gyrovorbis which had a video explaining programming languages and what they can be used for game developing wise. he also linked to another channel(Link) which showed new guys and girls the concepts of game developing with C++, allegro(link), and SDL(link). I spent the next year(2009 - 2010) messing with SDKs, tutorials, and optimizing code for a crappy laptop I had. Late May I released Cartridge Collector(Link). after making this game I started looking up open source games and found 1 single problem: there were no anti-hack protection, which left these games the best place to get into hacking. By August, I had found enough tutorials to write my own trainer( & it only took me that long because no one told me that “0x” was required by win32api for the address to be complete).
The months to come I stayed on forums and joined a few game programming projects and found out about that scriptable code i was looking for as a kid with Lua(Link). Today I'm currently working on this concept of scriptable hacking instead of dll injection(which i dont know how to use). hopefully this method can become useful in the future than executables for every single hack. I will continue to update this blog on any information I find and an open source (didn’t see that coming) Implementation & examples will be available. If you have any questions feel free to contact me at @grandmasterhack
GrandMasterHack
