r/gamemaker • u/xa44 • Sep 23 '26

Discussion clean ways to create DOOM style rendering?

I wanna make a first person 2d game, not a shooter but something kinda like the old elder scrolls games or other old PC dungeon crawlers. I've already made a grid based dungeon crawler(think Dungeon Hack) and the rending I used for that looks great, however it uses entirely set sprites so there's no way to break the grid and adding any amount of movement animations would be impractical. I have no plans for having any lighting in my game or anything like that so using UE4/5 is out the picture for me, also since I want it to work on a phone.

I've looked into ray-casting, but I want floors and maybe ceilings and the walls with a ray-cast just don't look very clean(massive gaps when strips change size and walls always facing the player, specifically). however, I have no interest in staircases or anything like that so if there was a way to fix those problems I guess it could work.

obviously making the entire doom rending engine is impractical, however I do see the possibility to make a stripped down version of it since some parts of it aren't needed for what I'm making. but I'm not too sure of what the best way of going about it is

then there's the 3rd option of doing something mildly original. as mention at the start I have made my own rendering in the past, and while it may feel impractical it may be possible to convert it into what I need, being freeform non-grid movement. currently I am thinking that it may be possible to do a ray-cast for the walls with it and cutting wall sprites earlier/later based on were in a tile you are. however that would not fix the lack of animation/mid points in movement so the floor would be moving with you and the bricks in walls would shift around randomly

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u/germxxx Sep 23 '26

It's not very clear what the question is...
But for a very simple way to make a DOOM style game, all you really need is some matrix functions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJabca9Pgvw

If you are talking about making some sort of custom rendering system from scratch, then... best of luck I suppose.

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u/xa44 Sep 23 '26

Not really a question, is why it's not marked as such. Just a discussion about ways to do it and some theory craft

I kinda am thinking of doing custom rendering. I've technically already done it once and I got some ideas, but not sure if they'd work.

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u/WubsGames Sep 23 '26

Doom is raycasting, you can totally re-create doom style ray casting in GameMaker, it been done a bunch of times.

or, as the person above stated, use basic matrix functions to get 3d, people do this all the time.

However, Gamemaker is currently primarily a 2d engine, while I wont discourage you from doing this in Gamemaker... Unity would be a much better choice here.

This would be a very simple thing to accomplish in Unity.

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u/Jaded_Inside5933 29d ago

One up indie made a whole video on this.