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Welcome

I discovered programming through video games. Age of Empires, GTA San Andreas, GTA IV. I broke config files, dropped scripts where they did not belong, and learned by fixing what I had just smashed. I was not trying to become a developer. I wanted to understand the worlds I was playing in. Years later, during a period where I had lost the pleasure of coding, I reopened GTA V, watched the characters again, and started rebuilding some of their behaviors. That is how Street Riders and InteractV were born, and that is why this school exists. If you want the long version, I wrote it here: J'ai codé un mod GTA pendant ma période la plus sombre.

This first lesson has one job: tell you what you are getting into, so nothing downstream feels arbitrary.

What this school is​

It is a programming school that uses video games as its laboratory. The hands-on work runs on GTA V, in C#, through ScriptHookVDotNet. But the goal is not to make you a specialist of one game. The goal is that you learn to design, build, and test your own systems, the kind of thing you find in almost every game: a character that reacts to what it sees, a mission with a real objective, a state that survives a restart.

The game is the playground. Software craft is the point.

Why learn here rather than alone​

You can absolutely learn modding alone. I did. The problem is the cost. GTA modding has thin documentation, and the generative AIs get a lot of it wrong: they invent natives that do not exist, use an old API, or hand you code that compiles cleanly but does nothing once you launch the game. The hard part was never the C# syntax. It is everything around your code: not blowing up memory, cleaning up the entities you spawn, and living with the native GTA AI, which does what it wants regardless of your plan.

This school walks that same path, minus the months of stumbling in the dark. Every piece of code you will read here has a twin that is compiled against the real game library before it reaches you. When a page shows you an API, it is because the compiler accepted it, not because it sounded right.

Learn by building, not by copying​

The first trap in modding is the illusion of competence. You copy a thirty-line bodyguard script, it runs, and you feel like a developer. Then the bodyguard shoots you, refuses your car, or clones itself every time you press a key, and you are stuck, because you never understood the code in the first place.

So this course is built the other way around. You type the code yourself. You read why each line is there. You break things on purpose, in a controlled place, because breaking things on purpose is the fastest way to understand them. Curiosity comes before theory, and understanding comes before the next step.

How the course is organized​

The path is a single line of eleven projects, from P0 to P10, with the lessons you need placed right before the moment you need them. You never learn a concept for later. You learn it because the next project cannot work without it.

The five stages are:

  • Discover: what modding is, why GTA V, and how to set up your workshop.
  • First script: your first mod that reacts to a key.
  • Foundations: the game loop, coordinates, entities, the things every mod stands on.
  • Game systems: tasks, factions, vehicles, state machines, missions, persistence.
  • Ship it: versioning, packaging, publishing, and two final projects you drive yourself.

Two of those final projects matter in different ways. Complete mod is a guided exam on a brief I give you. Capstone is a free project on a brief you write yourself. One proves you can follow a spec, the other proves you can stand on your own.

The course and the reference​

There are two spaces. The Course is this guided line you are on now. The Reference is a technical library you open when you want to go deeper on one notion or solve a precise problem. You never need to read the Reference cover to cover to move forward. The Course tells you when a detour is worth it.

Everything starts with an idea and a first attempt, not with mastering a language. The next lesson clears up the confusion almost every beginner carries: what a mod actually is, and what it is not.