It's been over a decade since I first found SDKPaint. I had never programmed before, but I remember getting inspired by this website and trying to make a website myself (this website became Home4DSi). In hindsight, they were life defining moments for me. Since then I've gone on to program many different things and I even enrolled and completed the Computer Science in university. It is not a stretch to say that this very website may very well have made me who I am today.

I also remember following the development of TMJ (The Mystical Journey), a prestigious project to bring a MMORPG to the limited Nintendo 3DS Browser. Again, I was inspired by this project so much, that I followed in its footsteps. I set out to try and create a MMORPG for the Nintendo 3DS Browser, myself. This game was called Project Triniate. I announced it on my website 3DSPlaza, kept everyone up to date, released gameplay video's every now and then and even made the early demo's playable by donators to the project. At one point, the project even made it into a few news articles, such as Nintendo Life and Kotaku.

In truth, with this project I probably bit off a bit more than I could chew, and my inexperience is also what ultimately caused the project to fail. I learned a lot from this project and my programming capabilities sure improved from it, but it went awry and I learned a very important lesson: Make offline backups. My webserver had crashed and although I had paid my webhosting provider (which I shall not name here) for daily backups that go two weeks back, those backups all turned out to be incomplete, making me lose a lot of hours of work on Triniate (and other projects as well!)

This setback was so big that the project ended there, 7 years ago. For all of those 7 years, I've kept the domain name Triniate.com, but only made it show a placeholder text that a lot of data was lost and there would be more news "later". That "later" ended up being... late 2020.

Although I never found back the latest version of Project Triniate, I did still have some older versions. Recently I decided that even though I will never finish the project, I should probably release it to the public in some way, because of it's uniqueness, in a way. With TMJ also never seeing the light of day, there never ended up ever being a MMORPG for the Nintendo 3DS Browser. And although the Triniate demo is far from finished, most of the mechanics that make a MMORPG a MMORPG (such as character creation, multiplayer, chat, combat, inventory management, NPC's, mining and even crafting) are in place.

That is why I have made the game available to play on https://triniate.com (a 3DSPlaza account is required to play), and also made the source code publicly available on Github: https://github.com/RobvandenBerg/Triniate. If you have run a website before, it should be fairly easy to run Triniate on your own webserver (no 3DSPlaza account will be neccesary in that case, of course).

So, to anyone that's interested in seeing this, you can now experience the MMORPG (or, well, one of the two MMORPG's) for the 3DS Browser that never was, as well as look at its complete code, create your own spin-offs, and if you're really dedicated, even contribute to the project.

P.S.: I would be really interested in something like this for the TMJ, too! To me TMJ was a big childhood mystery. I would love to see something other than the published demo's of it in action, even if it's incomplete and the Nintendo 3DS stopped being relevant years ago.