Interestingly enough. I also worked on a MapleStory emulator at around age 14. It was all done in C++ and it was an incredible learning experience. I learned about crypto, reverse engineering, networking, packet sniffing, hacking, etc. The strange part was that my current motivation for the entire field revolved around this project I did as a kid. I'm now 21 and working at a game company and teaching. It feels so surreal looking back at it because a lot of the concepts I dealt with at age 14, seem more complicated than some of the network programming I do nowadays.

I still have the source code laying around somewhere and here's a youtube video of its very early stages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH5FLfNPSn8