In this Developer Feature series, Spiffy talks to up-and-coming developers to learn what makes them tick. We talk with with 16-year-old Yan Zheng Hao, a first-year Game Design & Development student from ITE College Central (tertiary student) in Singapore.
What is your background and how did you get here?
My background in programming started with mainly on the assembly side. Admittedly I was quite a heavy gamer back then when I was 12 years old, its this fascination for the things you can’t do normally (‘hacking’) for the game that I’m playing which is MapleStory.
Rather than how most people started in programming with a Hello World app, I got to learn techniques like memory editing with CheatEngine (http://cheatengine.org) to change the game’s instruction according to what I want. (Schools in Singapore don’t teach programming until the age of 16 as a tertiary student) This soon became my foundation for programming when the first MapleStory game emulator, ‘odinms’ was released and open sourced back on 2008. I immediately downloaded it and start playing around with the source file written in Java 6 and Javascript.
Again, this fascination and even addiction to the game that got me into learning Java and JS in order to customize it to my needs. It took around 1-2 years of copy and pasting, or rather the term ‘leeching’ before making a breakthrough as I get to learn more things over time gradually. Every single emulator that’s publicity released was made for the global version of the game, and as a player for ‘MapleSEA’. I wanted to make one that’s based on the local edition, and that just took a month to successfully update the files for it.
I soon got quite a lot of attention from other developers in this field and a public server was even opened at one point in time with a partner that lasted for 2.5 years. We have gotten over 1200 concurrent players at some point in time at peak. I learned even more during this process as I was really the only developer to handle everything on the game play. Me and my partner is reluctant to trust anyone out there after the source code was leaked once. For instance, the switch to Linux CentOS to save cost on hosting fees instead the usual Windows Server 2003/2008, security issues (dealing with constant DDOS/DOS attack), server side programming, emulating techniques to keep the game up to date with the official ones, database management & etc. However it have to be shut down due to some issues in June 2012 that I am unable to disclose.
I am just an average scorer during my secondary school life, but the internet changed my life completely. In Singapore where the mentality of our society are towards education exclusively for a good future, why can’t anyone strike it on their own?
What motivated you to start building apps?
The shutting down of the server also means losing a source of my only revenue stream. That is when I made the switch my focus to mobile apps instead. Being already a rather passionate Windows Phone user with a HTC Trophy 7 and with Silverlight/.NET language available for development(means I am able to use my current Java knowledge and apply it, given that both languages were quite similar). I have chosen Windows Phone 7 as the platform. On top of that, as an early adopter of Windows Phone (Bought right after its launch in Singapore) there were a lot of missing gaps in terms of application required by me everyday.
It can also be annoying at times when there is a lot of peer pressure from my friends, when at that point of time the trend is towards iPhone 3GS and I’m considered to have a ‘low end’ or rather inferior phone without apps. I wanted to change that, and build it for myself as a start.
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