The beginning of my successful coding career on Neopets

written by Marie

Last updated on: July 22, 2018

Published on July 21, 2018

Marie-Philippe Gill - coding career neopets

How did I learn to code? What is the first programming language I learned? These are all the questions that I am asked very often! That is why I decided to write an entire article about it. Here is the long-awaited answer: I started learning the code thanks to Neopets around 11-12 years old!

What is Neopets?

Neopets is an online game where you can own virtual animals called “Neopets.” The game is very complete: it has online shops, puzzles, flash games, discussion forums, guilds, galleries, virtual houses … and much more!

My neopets Zedrix - coding career neopets

My neopet is crying because I haven’t fed him. Sometimes players would send me messages asking me to feed my neopets. Lol! SORRY!

Why I loved playing Neopets

Of the 10 years spent playing Neopets, I have never fed my little virtual creatures. That’s not why I played this game. What I liked to do was raise money, Neopoints, with various strategies: the stock market, buying and reselling more expensive objects, auctions, exchanges of lots of objects, etc.

Neoforums Avatars - coding career neopets

I also liked to accumulate avatars; these are the small images that we could acquire when we succeed specific actions: to have +1000 points to a game, to participate in an enigma, to participate in an annual event of the game, etc. Between you and me, the more avatars you have, the more you are considered cool by other players. These avatars are then your “profile image” on the forums.

We could also collect trophies. We could win awards by having the highest score in games or by participating in annual events. Here again, the more awards you have, the cooler you are!

Neopets does not look like that, but it’s a very complex and complete game. There are things to do for all tastes. I can not list all the possible activities; there are too many!

 

Related | Finding My True Passion in Tech – My 6-year Journey

 

Where is the code in all of this?

You may be wondering how all the activities I listed above are about the code… well, the code is everywhere on the game! We can use HTML and CSS to make our user profile look better, like this:

My User Lookup - coding career neopets

We could also customize our online shop:

My Shop on Neopets - coding career neopets

But what I liked the most was to manage my guild to design it. Guilds were a private community where players could chat with each other in our discussion forum. Here is a guild I picked at random to show you what it looks like:

A Guild On Neopets - coding career neopets

Now that I think about it… Already, at 12-13 years old, I wanted to lead a guild, lead a group of people… I already had leadership in me! In the guilds, the leaders often organized activities: raffles, auction of objects (because yes, there is also an auction center where you can have good deals if you are quick to offer prizes!), small games between members … Because the goal is that our members have fun in the guild and remain active!

As you might know, my first language is French. As the leading websites that were offering graphics to players were in English, like Sunnyneo and Jellyneo, I decided to create my graphics in French.

 

I started to create graphics in French

So I started doing graphics in French! I lost my first graphics that were made with Paint. I can tell you they were not very pretty! By cons, in those years, Photoshop and company were not as popular yet, so my graphics were ugly but still used by other players.

After Paint, I started using PhotoFiltre. I followed some tutorials and then I managed to create graphs like this:

Graphics I made for Neopets - coding career neopetsGraphics I made for Neopets - coding career neopets

I then proposed my graphics to the French community of Neopets, and they were famous for a few months. After that, better designers than me have arrived to take over with the famous photoshop!

I continued to offer graphics to players on a static HTML / CSS website hosted on freewebs.com. I remember very well getting up at dawn, 6-7am, during the week and on the weekend, to work on my little site, create more graphics to propose to players. To the misfortune of my mother who saw me spend all my time on the computer and was desperate to get me off the computer!

My favorite memory about this website is when I had to update my navigation bar. Since it was a static website, I had to go and edit ALL my HTML pages just to add 1 more link on the navigation. It’s crazy how much time I lost because I had a static website!

My First Website in HTML and CSS - coding career neopets

My first website built with HTML and CSS

 

Related | Q&A: My internships, my favorite programming language, and more!

 

Then, in High School…

Then, in high school, I had the chance to have computer courses during the 5 years that lasted my studies. If I didn’t learn HTML and CSS on Neopets before, I’m not sure if I would have taken the IT classes. I had that many classes because I was in a private school, I think. The public schools of my friends did not have the chance to have so many computer courses.

I was lucky enough to have a great teacher. From Secondary I, at age 12, we created a video game with Stagecast Creator. I don’t know why I remember this particular project, I think I was pretty impressed with what we can do on a computer! 

By the end of high school, we had a project to do with SketchUp. I hate this software. It never does what I want, and you have to be so patient! As my teacher knew I did not like this program, he allowed me not to do the same project as the rest of the class and instead I was allowed to learn javascript on my own! This is just one of many examples, but this teacher allowed me to explore my skills and gain confidence in my abilities.

Leaving high school at the age of 16, I was known as the walking girl reading and spending all her lunch hours at the computer lab! I like this description, it suits me well 🙂

 

What now?

After High School, I completed a college degree in computer sciences. I am currently studying software engineering at university and only have one year left until graduation. I am in the process of beginning a masters in machine learning! I will explain the rest of my education journey in another blog post.

 

Conclusion

I hope this blog post answers the never-ending question of how I learned to code and got interested to tech! I know we are a lot of people that started coding with Neopets. Is this your case too? Let me know in the comments of this article, I would love to know your story!

 

Credits

Copyright 2000-2018 Neopets, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used With Permission

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13 comments

Pauline September 5, 2018 - 9:01 am

Neopets was really awesome. It’s funny, that was my introduction to HTML and CSS, too!

Reply
Marie September 9, 2018 - 7:58 pm

Hi Pauline! Yay another person who learned HTML/CSS on neopets haha!!

Reply
Negarin October 11, 2018 - 9:00 am

InterestingI started learning the code when I was 13 years old and with C# classes.
Good luck out smart girl❤

Reply
Marie October 17, 2018 - 11:31 pm

Hello Negarin,
Wow, you started with C# at 13!?! That’s really impressive!
Thanks for your comment!
Marie

Reply
Tiffany October 13, 2018 - 10:39 pm

I totally played Neopets for years!
I started learning how to code my own sites around that age, too. Creating my own sites and playing Petz (and coding Petz) was my go-to for fun!
Ahh, the good old days.

Reply
Marie November 10, 2018 - 9:19 pm

Hi Tiffany!
Haha amazing! Yep, good old days. I wish neopets wasn’t full of bugs now. I’d probably still play sometimes!
Marie

Reply
CSY November 20, 2018 - 6:24 am

Awesome!!! I’m a 16 years old girl which currently studies Computer Science in high school. I enjoy programming and love it! I wish i can be like you. I want to study software engineering at university too!!! Thanks

Reply
Betsy February 10, 2019 - 12:07 pm

This makes me so incredibly happy that I was not the only woman that grew up on neopets and focused more on the coding/design aspect of it. I self taught myself how to code in CSS and HTML when I was very young too. Fast forward, and I’m a programmer with a computer science degree. Sad part is, I cannot find my old website I created using freewebs! I got pretty advance at the end..

Reply
Marie May 19, 2019 - 8:10 pm

Hello Betsy!
Of course, you’re not the only woman! There are a lot of stories like ours! 🙂
Ahh that’s sad indeed! I’m pretty happy I still have a few screenshots around! They are precious memories!
Marie

Reply
J March 3, 2019 - 11:04 pm

This was me too! I relate so much to this.
Discovering html through neopets, then graphics through all the fan sites completely changed my life.

Reply
Marie April 5, 2019 - 6:51 pm

They are so many of us who learned like this!! 😀 always nice to connect!

Reply
crystal December 7, 2020 - 3:48 pm

I loved neopets! I use to try to code stuff on there.

Reply
Marie December 17, 2020 - 5:21 pm

Me too! 😀

Reply

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