Tracing Rays and Some Design?

Compared to last block, this one was a doozy.

Or, well, I shouldn't say that. There was still plenty to learn about raytracing, and I wouldn't say there weren't challenges, but I had an easier time with this project.

I think in large part, this was due to the workflow. The way the assignment was structured meant I could make a clear planning and prioritization for each week. There was also much less time spent setting everything up for different environments on different devices using numerous external tools and libraries. We had a template, and from day 1, we could start implementing ray tracing features.

Ray tracing feels a lot more elegant than rasterization, and I loved getting immediate feedback when implementing new features. This was very helpful in debugging as well (a simple debug view did wonders to make things easier).

Another thing that was great about this block was the ability to design my own game (or demo; I chose the former). Over the past few months I've become more and more interested in the design-side of things, and I'm figuring out how best to combine that with the programming track I'm currently following. Unfortunately, we only had two weeks to design and implement a game around our raytracers, so my design process had to be brief. Still, just making a simple Miro board and going over the core principles of the game I'd be designing really helped form a better image in my head and streamlined the process of actually implementing it: 

If I were to do this project again, I would try to be more ambitious, as in the end, I kept it fairly safe. The raytracer has all the basics and some small extras, but nothing extraordinary. I would try to increase the quality/resolution of the rendered scene, and use blue noise and reprojection to reduce noise (rather than turning off my stochastic methods and rendering at a lower resolution and upscaling). I would also love to add more levels, and sounds.

For the time being, I will focus on another personal project (more to share in the future, I hope), but I might return to this project to add these features.