This tale grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it. – J. R. R. Tolkein

To make something wholly your own is to hunt down every spectre of what it could become; there is always ‘one more thing’. Those who are masters of their craft know when to put the hammer down, sit back, and admire their handywork.

Not me though…

Now where did I leave my spanner?

The Nameless Thing⌗

“Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things.” — Gandalf The White in The Two Towers

I maintain an application to help identify, print and distribute over 20,000 photographs annually. Over three years and two rewrites, the app has morphed into a patchwork Goliath of superfluous features. Every new need, an addition to a house that was never meant to have stairs.

While I was hammering away in the basement of my pet titan, mounting the railings for the newfangled Google Drive integration; I encountered this nameless thing, this unwelcome void, this ghastly abomination: this empty canvas.

I could find no sling large enough no shoot it down, no purpose brobdingnagian enough to feed its insatiable apatite. No table, no loading indicator, no preview could encircle this beast, some part of it always stayed empty.

He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?" — Genesis 3:1

Soon I realised that I would have to resort to using deeper magic to tackle the leviathan. The first of my endeavors was a clone of the Dinosaur Game from Google Chrome. I taught the dinosaur to jump, dash, double jump and ground slam; but it wasn’t enough.

Thus began my pilgrimage through the hallowed caves of the internet in search for a suitable spell.

My expedition ended in temptation — a snake coiled on a documentation page.

“Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Don’t teach a man to fish, and feed yourself. He’s a grown man, and fishing’s not that hard.” — Ron Swanson

On the SDL3 documentation page, I found examples of 3D games, and their accompanying code. Up until this point, I had always touched graphics APIs with a really wombly stick, but now it seemed almost pleasant.

For the uninitiated SDL or Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform development library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware via OpenGL/Direct3D/Metal/Vulkan. Or to put it simply, SDL3 is a middleman that shelters the developer from the idiosyncrasies of each platform they are targeting. It is used by video playback software, emulators, popular games, and my app.

It’s honestly surprising that it took this long for me to shoehorn a game into my very serious, totally necessary and 100% thought out photo tagging and editing application. SDL3 (the latest version) also introduced a GPU API, which I was already using it to stream and resize enormous image textures on the fly. It was perfect for my new use case. The use case being a fully 3D video game, embedded inside my photography tagging application.

In this series of blogposts, I am going to document the progress of developing the game, while paying attention to the uncharted parts of the ocean of computer graphics resources.