You can play the game online here.

Back in early 2022 I’d been making one of my regular revisits to 90s videogaming and spent a fun couple of hours playing Wolfenstein 3D by iD Software. I still have vivid memories of downloading and playing this back in 1992 from a BBS. I lived with my parents at the time (I’d have been 16) and I remember running round the house proclaiming “this changes everything, this changes everything”. Nobody cared!

Inspired by the game I had a crack at figuring out what it was doing and writing a raycasting engine using Turbo C. I got something working but it ran at a snails pace and had a strange fisheye effect.

For whatever reason while playing Wolfenstein 30 years later the itch started to itch and I decided I have to have another go. I didn’t set off with the intention of recreating the game and first I just tried to write the simplest raycaster I could:

Just plain walls, nothing clever. The source for this can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/JamesRandall/fsharp-simpleraycaster

Next I moved on to adding textures:

Again the source for this can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/JamesRandall/fsharp-simpleraycaster-textured

It was at this point that I decided to go a lot further and recreate the game for which the full source can also be found on GitHub: https://github.com/JamesRandall/fsharp-wolfenstein

If you want to learn more about how it works, including how to avoid a fisheye effect, I did a talk at JetBrains .NET Day 2023 which you can watch on YouTube:

I also began, but didn’t quite finish, a C# version using Blazor. There are a number of blog posts on this very website about that and you can find the source for that here: https://github.com/JamesRandall/csharp-wolfenstein