Programming

Developing the Waterwheel engine has been a surprisingly engaging and insightful journey. The level of control inherent in building a game engine from scratch has been a powerful motivator, driving me to achieve new levels of productivity. Structuring the project provided valuable insights into the design decisions behind established game engines like Unity.

Certain engine systems presented unexpected complexity. Implementing collision detection and resolving for even a limited set of collider types (tilemap, rectangle, and sector) required a deep dive into geometric algorithms and mathematical calculations. Similarly, navigation and pathfinding, while conceptually familiar, proved challenging to optimize for both path quality and runtime performance within a dynamic game environment. It took multiple iterations to get the pathfinding into a satisfactory state given the plans for my game.