Entombed Raycaster - Procedural maze generation in a Wolfenstein 3D-style engine
Show HN: Entombed in a Raycaster
Entombed Raycaster is a unique game experiment that combines a Wolfenstein 3D-style raycaster with the mysterious maze generation algorithm from the 1983 Atari 2600 game Entombed. The maze is generated one row at a time using a 32-entry lookup table, with no backtracking or guarantees of solvability. The project offers both a C implementation and a browser-based Three.js version, where players navigate a Backrooms-inspired environment, breaking walls and evading enemies. It's a fascinating blend of retro game archaeology and modern rendering techniques, perfect for developers interested in procedural generation and raycasting.
The algorithm defies easy categorisation, and may be unique. With its reliance only on local information, it is tempting to view the algorithm as based on cellular automata, yet the lack of parallelism and the strange shape of the 'neighbourhood' of cells surrounding X makes the cellular-automata notion contrived.