Lands of Maimia, a game I made when I was 11
Digging through my old hard drive, I uncovered a project that much of my early coding experience game from. Meet Lands of Maimia, from an 11-year-old me.
MMORPGs were all the rage those days, and I wanted to try my hand at one. The tile scroll system was learned from a book by Jonathan Harbour. The interface, combat system, NPCs, artwork, and even fonts, were all of my own design. That's probably why they suck so much.
As I go through the game, 9 years later, I am shocked at how much detail I added. Combat was supported, and depending on the level of the animal, they would either flee from you or actively initiate combat. Several classes were created, and the mage class had special spells that could be cast. But they required certain items to be in your inventory.
To get these items in your inventory, one had to explore and find mines or other plants, and harvest the items by holding control and walking over them. The entire map was loaded into memory at once, so I designed special tile IDs that would teleport the viewport of the player to another location when touched. This allowed the player to travel throughout the game world. I'm honestly not sure how big the game world is. Because no matter how much thought I put into connecting every little detail, from NPC merchants to player guides, from quests to hidden treasures, I lacked one major goal: making the game fun.
Maimia had it all. It even saved your progress and locked your game with a password. But it was a pain to play, and I eventually gave up on it as new projects perked my interest. It laid untouched on my hard drive for all of middle school and high school, during which I played with other things, like whiteboard interactions, building social networking sites, and hijacking my friend's Tumblr to ask her to prom. But in my excavations this weekend, I found a working copy. Sort of. It doesn't work on modern machines. But if you want to know how to play it, check out the instructions after these screenshots.
I even came up with a fake company called "LimiaSoft" and wrote an EULA.. of sorts.
To get it running, you need to download the zip installer, and a machine running Windows XP. To get the latter, I used the machines at Modern.IE.
- Get a XP machine or virtual machine running.
- Boot into Safe Mode (press F8 as the machine boots up)
- Install the VirtualBox Additions, and make sure to check Direct3d support.
- Turn off the machine and change the display settings. Make sure 3d acceleration is turned on, and give it as much video RAM as possible.
- Start into Windows and download/install the DirectX 8 redistributable from Microsoft's website.
- Copy the Lands of Maimia installer zip to the virtual machine. I did this using share folders, since copy/paste and drag/drop wouldn't work for me.
- Install Lands of Maimia
- Enjoy.
And that concludes my walk down memory lane.