About

On May 19th 2023 I fell off a wall in Hamburg and broke my calcanus (heel bone). I was sent home with 14 screws and a titanium plate in my heel, and told that it would be 12 weeks before I could put weight on the foot again. So while I’m lying around waiting for my bones to knit back together, I figured I would tackle one of my passion projects.

I think for many of us, engines which drove the games of the 80s and 90s were truly beautiful creations. Personally, I find the level of craftsmanship required to run such powerful little engines on older hardware is truly inspiring. I would love to attempt to recreate some of the magic they contained.

The 2.5D engine used in the original Wolfenstein 3D is one of the seminal feats of software engineering in history. The team at id Software developed an engine that completely revolutionised gaming, and launched a franchise that persists to this day.

Several wonderful implementations of the famous ray casting algorithm exist online already, for example F. Permadi’s excellent ray-casting series, or Lode’s Computer Graphics Tutorial among many, many others. Even so, I’m hoping that I might be able to bring a few new items to the table. We’ll see how things go!

I will be writing the engine using Rust and WebAssembly, primarily because I cannot code in either of these languages. I figure it can’t be a bad thing if I learn some new coding languages along the way…

Hope to see you around!