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.

The Bare Minimum

After goofing around for a while, I discovered ssloy/tinyrenderer. This is an outline on how to build a really basic software renderer. However, I quickly realised that a lot of what was being done was rather (intentionally) handwavey for my taste and I decided that I would go about implementing everything in my own uniquely deranged way while documenting the process.

So for the first few articles I will be following the general outline of ssloy/tinyrenderer. My code will inevitably be slightly different from what ssloy came up with. For instance our line drawing algorithms look slightly different, since we took different routes to get there.

I like videogames and I’m overconfident, so naturally when a YouTube video of someone making Minecraft with various levels of “from scratch” shows up in my feed, I can’t help but feel like I could probably do that.

Around 6 months ago, I finally decided that I should probably do it, and showcase an awful game that I will justify as being impressive purely because of how much time I wasted reinventing the wheel.