StarCraft Taught Me How to Code
It was the year 2000. I regularly hung out with my best friend, Mike. His older brother, Bobby, was always in the office using the computer. He was playing StarCraft. I was really captivated by it. Bobby commanded massive armies and used them to destroy enemies from an isometric point of view.
Bobby never left the computer long enough for me to give it a try, but Mike said they have it for the N64. We stayed up until 7 in the morning the next day playing it. It was terrible. An RTS on a console was an abomination. A mouse and keyboard was a necessity. But I was 10 years old and I didn't care and we couldn't stop playing.
I eventually got the game for my own computer. It was the fist online game I ever played. Battle.net was a super highway to another dimension. I could play with anyone—from the east coast to the west coast, Europe to Asia. It was easier to find people with similar interests than on the Web.
You could essentially create your own game using StarCraft assets. It taught me logic and how to code.
The game was fun. But the thing that became my favorite was its campaign editor. You could essentially create your own game using StarCraft assets. It taught me logic and how to code. You would create conditional statements, and if conditions were met, then something would happen as a result.
When you played other peoples' games, you first downloaded them and they would go in a specific folder that you could open in the campaign editor. Sometimes people used mods that would lock you out and prevent you from reading their logic, but most of the time you could learn from them and see how the games worked.
I read a lot of other peoples conditional statements, copied them and saw how they functioned. I learned a lot about triggers, making things happened at certain times, or causing something to happen when someone brings something to a specific place.
I give a lot of credit to StarCraft for my love to code and build things for the Web.
