If you want to play with software rendering, here's probably the shortest code that will get an ARGB8888 2D array from main memory to the screen efficiently for all platforms using SDL2 in C https://gist.github.com/CoryBloyd/6725bb78323bb1157ff8d4175d... you'll need to do the translation from a 320x200x8-bit palletized framebuffer to ARGB yourself ;)

If you want to get inspired by what can be done with palletized framebuffers check out http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ (click Show Options) and the GDC presentation by the artist https://youtu.be/aMcJ1Jvtef0

With that you can fire up https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter for that classic Deluxe Paint IIe vibe. Or, https://www.aseprite.org/ for something more modern.

I am not even a noob with game development. I dabbled with Godot a couple years ago and was making a funny weight lifter game, some sorta stat management sim. It was actually pretty fun but I didn't get past some pretty early working versions.

I thought I could really level up with Claude and I started working on a boxing game. It's been a total disaster. .·°՞(˃ ᗜ ˂)՞°·.

I find the most interesting things are the internal tools -- like the Python script to generate the gib animation, or the other Python script to generate 2D spritesheet from Blender. OP is definitely a 10x engineer who can also do good arts. This is very rare IMO. I'm very surprised to find that OP has consistent art direction.

This is taking a lot of inspiration from Doom, but the actual raycasting engine is more like Doom's predecessors, the most well-known of which is probably Wolfenstein 3D: perpendicular walls, constant floor and ceiling height. Wolf3D didn't have textured floors and ceilings because of performance reasons, but several other similar games had them. Doom and IIRC Duke Nukem as well used a BSP engine which was much more flexible (walls could intersect at any angle, variable floor and ceiling heights), although the levels were still "flat" (you couldn't have several "stories" inside a level, e.g. you couldn't design a bridge that you could walk over and under).

In the final video, it looks like the destructible vases take several shots to destroy. IMO, they should only take one. Real life vases only take one, so requiring more makes the gun feel weak. It seems to be cosmetic anyway, so there's no game balance reason to require more.

Graphics programming in the early to mid 1990s was pretty fun: write pixel data into the memory-mapped video RAM and it appears on the screen! A pointer to 0xA0000 was all you needed - no API or anything. The reason for the non-square-pixel 320×200 VGA mode they mention was that the video buffer took 64000 bytes, which fit into a 16-bit segment, making addressing it easy in 16-bit code/CPUs.

Step 0 is missing: having a great taste. One look at the video example is enough to figure out that the author keeps things in balance and in style. Explanations of why pixel grid mismatch looks wrong, or why mismatch between texture density and geometric complexity (in both ways) looks horrible, or why smoothing does not blend with pixel art are then made in retrospect.

Some details are a bit too cool for 1993, though, and assume high frame rate (won't work that well at low fps). Smooth weapon animations with a lot of frames, tiny per-pixel effects on bullet holes and flash sprites, smooth movement and object position calculations that use precise math instead of fast rough estimates resemble Chasm: The Rift or Quake (the concept of idle animations, e. g. objects moving in the starting view of difficulty selection room, assumes that there is some performance to waste on details that make the world less empty).

I just noticed that this might be one of the rare shooters with a female protagonist: the cat has a calico pattern, and those are almost always female (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_cat).

This is so great. Another fun trick we used in the 90s was palette animation -- by swapping the palette you can create incredibly cool effects at a low runtime cost.

This is terrific. I love reading about the creative process involved in a project like this, finding cool solutions to self-imposed boundaries.

I think the mix of highly rational reasoning and "it just feels right" is a killer combo too, it gives a rigorous basis for a lot of the decisions made, while also allowing for a strongly personal aesthetic to emerge. Very cool indeed.

I'm tinkering with a voxel space rendering tech demo as a PlayStation homebrew. After one weekend of work I'm getting decent results (like, 10-15 FPS) and I've yet to use the DMA, the GTE or even polylines primitives.

It's refreshing to dust up trigonometry and good old low-level optimization tricks. When the scratchbuffer has 1 KiB and the stack can only use a fraction of that, it makes me realize how spoiled I'm at work with the microcontrollers we have, with threads being allocated 8 KiB of stack and backtraces with over 50 functions of C++ templates on it.

As a fellow 3d-engine-with-foolishly-unreasonable-constraints developer, I love the detail in the explanations here and seeing the process you went through.

>> What this actually means is, the constraints I have foolishly imposed upon myself are as follows....

Those kind of constraints can lead to increased creativity, and can also influence the overall style of a game. It's part of the reason early 80's arcade games had so much diversity.

A great writeup of excellent work!

The flight simulator / magic carpet easter egg in Microsoft Excel 97 used that same shaded-colormap palette trick, plus some dithering:

https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg/about.html

I'm impressed by your sprite pipeline and gibs animations. Your attention to detail and navigation of constraints have really paid off, I can't wait to play this sometime

For some reason I irrationally like the posterization effect that's created when something is darkened to almost zero.

I respect the amount of work that goes into projects like this; I can't wait to be able to play it.

Consider a premium, boxed version. I would buy it. And I think a lot other would. Maybe try a kickstarter to see how many are interested?

This is a great write-up of your process and behind-the-scenes peek at the making of what looks to be a really fun game! Can't wait to play and delve into the code once you release it.

one of my very first solo projects during high school was writing a wolfenstein-like raycaster from scratch. I still hold some very fond memories of programming it, arguably one of the moments I fell in love with the craft

Every time I think about graphics programming, I think about how we did it in the mid 90s when I was in high school messing around with exactly these things. XOR operations to drive animations, writing directly to memory, etc. (Clearly I do backend stuff now...)

Everything is perfect here. The hero, the graphics, the title... <3

I really loved that article. Creating games always seemed so daunting to me since I don't know a lot about how it's done, there are so many different processes involved. The solutions described here are so satisfyingly compact and so easy to understand given the simple constraints, and yet they produce an actual game that looks nice.

Much respect -- at first glance when I saw the animated gif I thought this was just a project making assets from scratch for an existing game engine (e.g. Doom or Wolf 3D) but then I realize it's creating all the game code from scratch too! (But using similar techniques from the old days). Amazing work.

This game looks great I really like the style it is inspiring.

The author seems to consider open-sourcing the engine, I would also be interested in the mentioned scripts for asset creation. Those scripts would make a great toolset for asset creation in this style.

As a side note, the visual style in the game reminds me a lot of Exhumed / Powerslave :-).

> Wolf3D didn't have textured floors and ceilings because of performance reasons, but several other similar games had them

Blake Stone Rise of the Triad used later versions of the Wolf3D engine and had textured floors/ceilings

> Doom and IIRC Duke Nukem as well used a BSP engine which was much more flexible

Duke Nukem (Build engine) did not use BSP

https://www.jonof.id.au/forum/topic-137.html#msg1548

> Duke Nukem as well used a BSP engine

The Build engine didn't use BSP, it treated connections between sectors as portals and rasterized the walls as (90 degree rotated) trapezoids while performing clipping against those portals. This allowed it to have dynamic wall geometry (e.g. moving trains, rotating light fixtures, etc) as well as "room-over-room" setups as long as you couldn't see both rooms at the same time (in both Blood and Shadow Warrior they found a workaround for it allowing to create more "3D" spaces by making identically shaped sectors with the floor of one sector acting as a portal to the ceiling of the other sector - supposedly this wasn't "natively" supported by the engine, but it was flexible enough for the game studios who used it -without even having access to the source- to do it themselves).

The first level of Duke Nukem 3D does use a few Build tricks - e.g. another one is that sprites can be "axis aligned" instead of following the camera and they can also have collision - this can be used to create rudimentary 3D geometry by treating each sprite as an axis aligned quad and in the first level it is used to make a bridge between two buildings (right before the level exit button).

With regard to floors, afaik even DOOM didn't do them correctly. With vertical walls, the perspective divide needs to be done only once per column of pixels for a given wall segment.

For floors, unfortunately there's no such luxury, and if I remember correctly DOOM subdivided floors into patches, and only did proper perspective at the corners, and interpolated inbetween.

Later on, in Shadow Warrior, you could even do that, i think they used portals to implement it and i remeber it was a pain to set up in the editor.

I thought at first it was just a skinned Wolfenstein 3D. Which is grossly unfair. A lot of work here.

> rare shooters with a female protagonist

It's not that rare, is it? Off-hand, and very mainstream; Perfect Dark, Mirrors Edge, Dishonored (don't remember if it's the first or second one), Metroid and more are all kind of "shooters" with female protagonist, although maybe Mirror's Edge is more just "first-person" than "shooter" to be 100% accurate.

Not to mention the large selection of "RPG + FPS" where you can be either man or woman.

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Seems the author also realize the thing with the pattern and likely gender of the cat:

> After all, I do need to give the protagonist his fair share. [image] (Yes, I know it's a female, but call it convention rooted in dialect.)

> one of the rare shooters with a female protagonist

No, this isn't a Perfect Dark game

A lot of boomer shooters nowadays have a female protagonist, e.g. Selaco[0], Supplice[1], The Citadel[2] and its sequel[3], Zortch[4] (and its upcoming sequel[5]), Nighmare Reaper[6], COVEN[7], Viscerafest[8], Hedon[9], etc. If anything i'd say that nowadays there are way more boomer shooters with female protagonists than not :-P (combining the tags "boomer shooter" with "female protagonist" on Steam search gives 143 results, though that includes games where you can either choose your character's gender or you play as a woman for a part of the game even if you play as a man for most of it).

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1592280/Selaco/

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1693280/Supplice/

[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1378290/The_Citadel/

[3] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3371240/Beyond_Citadel/

[4] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2443360/Zortch/

[5] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3807500/Zortch_2/

[6] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1051690/Nightmare_Reaper/

[7] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1785940/COVEN/

[8] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1406780/Viscerafest/

[9] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1072150/Hedon_Bloodrite/

I doubt it was intentional, but in general, I am not impressed by that and don't find any value in that. Same with Hollywood's depiction of women knocking out guys twice their size. Unrealistic, ridiculous, and harmful.