Renderer Progress May to September 2022

A quick recap of the progress made so far, from the lowly triangle to a combination of interesting rendering techniques. Progress is slow because it’s a hobby project, but I’m having lots of fun with it! I wish I’d taken videos both with and without the pixellated filter enabled, but it’s ok - that’s what the game looked like at the time!

This video showcases the journey of building a Metal renderer in Swift Playgrounds over several months, highlighting the various visual effects and rendering techniques developed along the way. Despite being a hobby project with slower progress, the iterative development approach has yielded impressive results.

New Spaceship Design: Caliper

A new ship design: Caliper. Since I accepted that I can’t do everything on my iPad for my Metal renderer/game written in Swift Playgrounds, I figured I might as well start expanding the world using Blender. For this one I wanted to deviate from the “fighter jet” style I’ve used previously. The Blender render looks a lot more interesting than this video showing it in my renderer, as I have only a very simple material system. I’d love to improve this and introduce some physically based rendering concepts soon!

New Spaceship Design: Caliper

This marks a shift in my development approach - moving from purely iPad-based creation to incorporating Blender for more sophisticated 3D modeling while maintaining the core development in Swift Playgrounds.

Stylised Spaceship Exhaust Trails

First attempt to experiment with stylised exhaust trails. The approach is inspired by the square trails from Alone by Laser Dog Games. There are a few things still to work out - in particular correctly preserving some aspects of rotation and scale while removing the camera rotation.

This entry is part of a series on writing a Metal Renderer in Swift Playgrounds.