Me quietly making a python game with no shell whatsoever, literally just making a dwarf fortress clone in the text engine not even to prove a point, just to ease myself into python
What I was ready for: Making a basic maze game in Microsoft Excel What I got: Making a basic maze game with RAYCASTING in Microsoft Excel My Wolfenstein 3D loving heart was completely hooked.
They've basically already (re)-created Wolfenstein 3D. DOOM runs fairly similar under the hood, just with the level upgraded from a tilemap to defined polygonal "rooms".
At the point you start talking about rendering a 3D world I just kept going "Yes, now you're getting it" as you delved deeper and deeper into how the hell games are 3D, and why that's actually much harder to do than people think. Next Step: Explaining a Graphics API...lol
@@frandurrieu6477 Excel was always the best office software in the microsoft library, no wonder every office around the globe uses it from beginner white coller to CEOs. Amazing
This is absolutely brilliant, I don't think I've audibly gasped as loudly at a TH-cam video as I did when you projected the map into 3D. Subbed, can't wait to see your other stuff, you deserve all the recognition omg
This is an absolutely amazing video. REALLY didn't expect it to go to the direction of ray-casting, but it's always nice to see, as it's one of the coolest core principiles of game creation. It's insane how I, a person with zero coding or computational knowledge, understood ABSOLUTELY everything in this video. The script was extremely fun and engaging to follow too. Great job.
seems to me like VBA is the game engine and excel is only the render pipeline. I would have expected huge sets of self referencing formulas to create a game loop that gets updated when pressing F9...
It's a similar relationship to that of C# and Unity. The main job of a game engine is rendering and a programming language is much better equipped for game logic.
Read the chapter marks again, and really note down what the video teaches you in terms of game engine functionality, and tell me it doesn't answer what a game engine is / does
It shows you how this is not just a game the moment it starts talking about how this piece of software could handle whatever game you want to develop on it. ...as far as I understand.
Render into a cache, then copy all cells once completed. You'll skip the jarring background redraw and because you've done all of your calculations on the first pass, it'll make the draw faster.
i think you can switch between sheets with vba so you don't even need to copy the cells, you can just render to a different sheet then switch when it's done, then do that with the previous sheet and so on (which is funny given that's what almost all graphical software does)
@@narrativeless404 not exactly, usually the "copy to the other buffer" bit doesn't happen - let's say we have two buffers, A and B you start by displaying the contents of buffer B while you write the next frame to buffer A, and when you're done you start displaying the contents of buffer A while you write the next frame to buffer B every time you swap, you're essentially displaying a new frame to the screen
This brings back memories. Ages ago I took Intro to Programming and started to learn my first language, C++. By the end of the class, I had made several games using a library I found called n-curses. My best one was snake. Along with a survival mode, it had a campaign with 40 something levels. I had a map builder in excel to make adding levels a breeze.
maybe it is just me being stoopid, but I think it would have been a good idea to show some code at the start, kind of just show how you make excel move the player cell and such. I think it is a vital part of the process and would make people understand better what you have actually done. Basically I think it would be better to show more of the process. But great video nonetheless, interested to see more of your projects.
the point is there is no coding going on. excel is doing this solely off the txtfiles. the entire conceit of the video is nobody knows how game engines work and excel is the simplest game engine that Just Works without you knowing how its reading your inputs
I love how the video turned so hard into wait lets make this an actual video game that I forgot the original premise was to define what a game engine is, but by the end of the video I had a so much more robust understanding of what a game engine is, insane writing/explaning skills!!!
i adore this video. this may be one of my favorites on the entire site. ive studied gamedevelopment mostly to get into the nitty gritty of the technology behind games, to see how they function in the basics. your explanation is spot on and your incredulousness during the entire process is amazing to hear. and then the implicit realisation all that modern games are, is actually just more complex and bigger versions of this excel thing. i love it so much.
What I love about this video is that it teaches 1. the very basic fundamentals of game design and 2. The power of using math and text in Excel. This has a lot of potential for enhancing the functionality of AI tools, as SQL databases are extremely expensive. However this video is proof that Microsoft Excel is free but robust enough to function as substittue for taking AI tools to the next level. and that Math can be fun!
This was great. I taught myself VBA to make a program for my boss to render accurate models for his clients instead of drafting engineering diagrams that aren't as intuitive for laymen to read. It took a while, but since I got it working I've continued to add onto it and now we do most of our product planning from a spreadsheet. Rather than just backfilling cells, I hide and unhide custom objects and move them around based on the cells and given dimensions. Each cell represents a quarter inch, so I just use basic multiplication to quadruple all the dimensions we're given. I know there are better alternatives and that my code isn't efficient, but since it was all I had access to with no knowledge of writing code, I am still impressed by how capable Excel truly is. I was disappointed in your efforts to showcase that in this video UNTIL you began rendering 3D first person POV shots. Very well done!
This is eldritch and fantastic and insanely impressive. It's also incredibly well described in accessible language (mostly), this horrendous experiment is a *perfect* video. Well done, you should be proud.
not only is this a surprisingly informative video for someone who knows fuckall about game engines (it's me i know fuckall), but also the dramatic organ music playing as microsoft excel renders a 3D image is Very funny. i've been sort of binging your videos and you're really good at this simultaneous somewhat-subtle education and humor thing
This video was fascinating and delightful. There was something off about the "fundamental flaw with the initial concept" that made me think if it would be possible to optimize performance (through a reduction of horizontal or vertical resolution) using vector graphics, drawing features, or image insertion (like sprite based videogames), and that led me down a rabbit hole that led to a place called excelunusual that has blog posts about 2D and 3D graphics and animation! So if you ever want to make a sequel to this wonderful video, that's probably a good place to do the research necessary to make this run well enough that you would be able to combine your raycasting mechanic to create a setup in which it would be possible to make pretty much anything that doesn't require a player to look up and down. Personally I'd love to see that. This was delightful to watch😁
Just a quick note of appreciation for you, I found this channel like an hour ago and put it on in the background while i was cramming French (I am still, unfortunately, cramming French) but you're great ! Videos are nicely put together, the humour is funny and I like how you kinda sound like you are about to cry every second. Matches my study mood.
And here I thought I was brilliant when I created a basic battleship spreadsheet, sent a copy to my coworker, and the two of us played through the company chat client throughout the day while we worked. Extremely well done; I audibly gasped when I saw the 3d render!
holy shit you are so good at explaining! as someone who struggles to structure my thoughts and steps when coding, this is super cool to watch! the way you break down each step makes it feel totally manageable and not overwhelming and makes me want to code again!
Gosh. I just. I keep coming back to this video because your voice is so lovely. Something about the cadence, the tones. It's so appealing to me. Keep on keepin' on.
This video is absolutely incredible writing. I put this on intending to play a game to fill my hands but you held my attention the entire way through! Thank you very much, I've seen other videos talk about it and I went in with an intuition of: "A game engine is a piece of software that can simulate and render a space, enabling the user to attach logic to that space and entities in it" but the writing, the music, the presentation and the preempting of my questions as you went through was perfect! Thank you Ellie, and thank you Tatyana for the work that went into making such a tightly written video!
Honestly, this is what they should be teaching to people, who seriously want to start programming games. Forget programming languages, before that, let's learn the concept by trying some stuff in Excel, software every programming enthusiast has come into contact with! This "fundamental flaw in the initial concept", as you put it, should be the core drive, motivation and passion for programmers. Forget the limitations we're under: Let's do the best we can with what we've been given! I applaud you for this masterpiece of a lecture!
16:05 I don't see that as a problem since it now makes it look like a Spiritual Successor to "3D Monster Maze" since that game also allows playes to see each frame as it renders
I have seen people make many different games in Excel but I have never seen someone make such a complex game in it. The way you explained the whole process step-by-step really helped me understand the concept instead of getting bored. Great video! 👏
14:44 A slightly more in depth explanation: The distance to the wall determines how tall the wall is drawn in that column with closer walls drawn taller and further walls drawn shorter. The color is determined by the direction the wall faces with north/south walls drawn with light green and east/west walls drawn in dark green.
Really fun to watch! This reminded me of my freshman year in a game design course where a team I was a part of incidentally DID make our game prototype (the main required part for the project) entirely in Excel, but the scope of this is way larger and much more fun!!
Making a map editor was actually such a genius approach. I was gonna say just ask chatgpt to generate you a vba script that makes a maze with a set width and height. I remember having to program a maze generator in C for learning recursions (this was over 2 years ago now so I have no idea how I did it, somehow I passed that class)
9:40 you dont exactly need the comma method. since every map will be read with the same algorithm, you can know which exits will be read in which order, and at the end of the file, you can have a list of exits, where each exit will be mapped to an E letter
"So I made this silly little top down maze game! You can move your little player cube around through the blocky hallways aaaand here it is rendered in 3D in excel!" I'm sorry, that escalated quickly can you run that back?
I think a game engine is just a library that is useful for making games. This video does not directly answer the title but this is still a really cool video and really cool idea. Excel and Google sheets are epic.
Another question is if you think it needs to have an editor to be an engine. Because there's also those libraries for making games like XNA/FNA. They are kinda game engines but I like differentiating them by calling them game frameworks.
@@nooshstuff I was going to say the thing he'/s talking about is framework, actually framework is something we can load into a game engine to expand it, right?!?!?!?
Dude. I’ve been wanting to do this for so long. I saw a video one day of someone building Doom in excel. I’m now one step closer. Thank you. Please. Please tell us how you coded this? I’m desperate.
My co-workers made an online multiplayer of Battleship about a decade ago in Excel. It was as basic as you could get since neither of them were programmers but they used the Shared Document feature and some VBA to check hits and misses and it worked. I've always said it's actually not terrible for rapid prototyping since the UI and Graphics management is essentially done for you.
Code Bullet recently made a video doing a similar thing with Microsoft Paint, and even the Windows File explorer. strange timing, but i’m not complaining. more game engines for me.
the thing is, code bullet used python scripts for the actual game, while ms paint and file explorer were essentially just the display. this video is different because it makes the actual entire game within excel
Damn you got me with that pause thing. We're too predictable. Also, I expected this video and your channel to have way more views/subs. I suspect that it's only a matter of time if you're content continues to be this fucking good dude. I'm excited to see your next video!
did doom run on excell? i remember that doom windows edition was included in excell at some point.... for some reason but i am not sure if ID jus packaged their engine into or ran it natively.
Dude when I saw you were gonna make it 3d I went "no fucking way". But this actually gives me an idea and I appreciate the value I found here. I was fascinated the whole way through and learned all kinds of cool things!
This was super cool! When you talked about doing a first person view I thought you might be doing an "Eye of the Beholder" style psudo 3D sort of thing but you really went all out.
This is interesting from the perspective of someone who is old enough to remember Prodigy as one of the earliest consumer versions of the internet (which included pictures being displayed in layers when graphics were needed) and the original Doom as one of the first games to really handle 3D rendering in real time. Effectively, you recreated how they solved those problems. This is very cool simply because that is clearly the most effective and efficient way to handle things given the limitations. This is also a perfect example of what game designers have to deal with in any game engine: knowing its the limitations and figuring out how to use its strengths to work around those limitations.
When I was studying the Numenta neural network at university, I realised that for all the fancy OOP that went into it, you were making a database of cells, their connections, and their connection strengths. So you could run an AI in SQL.... Or Excel! With the right mapping, you could save your whole brain state in a CSV. It's that a nice thought lol.
"YOU ARE PLAYING A POWERPOINT PRESENTATION"
"No, Excel actually."
Me quietly making a python game with no shell whatsoever, literally just making a dwarf fortress clone in the text engine not even to prove a point, just to ease myself into python
Frankly, the way they’re doing it here reminds me of the game, except instead of . I use #.
And they're excelling at it.
psh. we were making powerpoint games 20 years ago. excel is the NEW technology these days.
dat frame rate tho
What I was ready for: Making a basic maze game in Microsoft Excel
What I got: Making a basic maze game with RAYCASTING in Microsoft Excel
My Wolfenstein 3D loving heart was completely hooked.
finally someone who gets it (unironically i have two entire management sims, one for F1 and one for airlines, that I run through Google Sheets)
I'm curious how it looks like and how it works now lol
Could you give us any way of playing it? I would love to try it out
I'm curious too
Send the excel link 😍
WE WANT A VIDEO 😍
Now recreate DOOM in Excel.
Funny because this first person rendering is moreless how the original Doom works.
It's surprisingly close already
They've basically already (re)-created Wolfenstein 3D. DOOM runs fairly similar under the hood, just with the level upgraded from a tilemap to defined polygonal "rooms".
LOL 😂🎉
Aiit bet
I was content to call it a video game when you just had 1 simple maze done, but then you just kept going, absolute madness. I love it.
At the point you start talking about rendering a 3D world I just kept going "Yes, now you're getting it" as you delved deeper and deeper into how the hell games are 3D, and why that's actually much harder to do than people think.
Next Step: Explaining a Graphics API...lol
it's hard but it's fun....kinda like opengl
I was in the Army at 2005, we had variety of games purely made of Microsoft Excel.
I liked a turn based strategy game most.
thats amazing
Damn turns? thats nice. Also godamn impressive withthe sheer difference in tools excel had back then
@@frandurrieu6477
Excel was always the best office software in the microsoft library, no wonder every office around the globe uses it from beginner white coller to CEOs. Amazing
@@frandurrieu6477my uncle said they coded 2d tanks LAN pvp game in excel
Awesome
The slightly desperate tone of your voice throughout the video is just perfect lol
I could feel the descent into madness as the video progresses, incredible voiceover, instant subscribe
They are just trans and trying to do a more Fem voice
@@billykindell1695 her pronouns are she/her and you're degendering her.
@@billykindell1695 They failed
@@SongStudiosI think she did really good
Next video, Forcing Unreal Engine to be a Microsoft Excel Engine
I would be VERY surprised if that wasn't possible or even that difficult if you understand how to use URE
Starcel
@@anthonybice3531
Apparently that translates to "old man" from... (squints) Slo-ven-ian...
That would be very easy.
Analysing business finances using unreal engine
This is absolutely brilliant, I don't think I've audibly gasped as loudly at a TH-cam video as I did when you projected the map into 3D. Subbed, can't wait to see your other stuff, you deserve all the recognition omg
As a coder for 30 years, this is brilliant.
if you wanted to make it so you can't see the maze being drawn, you could draw it on another spreadsheet and copy it over once it has finished drawing
You just figured out how to implement vsync.
@@AaronMorrisTheSteamFoxmore like double buffering
@@moimoi9995i have no idea what those 2 are
Just set Application.ScreenUpdating = False at the beginning of the update?
@EllieRasmussen
i paused the video and did the maze 😔
It was hard until you got to a certain point.
BLASPHEMY!!
i didnt pause and did the maze 😎
I did the maze in 1 minute
Only took a few seconds, you just work backwards from your goal, which is why fog of war mazes are the way to go.
0:07 [cries in Godot]
Frrrr
TRUEEEE 😭 People be sleeping on Godot
Roblox studio:
@@purplevanilla that isnt realy a game engine?
@@sminnty agreed
honestly, the madness settled in by the time we got .
but i gasped when i realized you did a 3d render IN EXCEL . amazing work
This is an absolutely amazing video. REALLY didn't expect it to go to the direction of ray-casting, but it's always nice to see, as it's one of the coolest core principiles of game creation. It's insane how I, a person with zero coding or computational knowledge, understood ABSOLUTELY everything in this video. The script was extremely fun and engaging to follow too. Great job.
seems to me like VBA is the game engine and excel is only the render pipeline. I would have expected huge sets of self referencing formulas to create a game loop that gets updated when pressing F9...
It's a similar relationship to that of C# and Unity. The main job of a game engine is rendering and a programming language is much better equipped for game logic.
Sadly VBA is going away soon in Excel, according to Microsoft.
@@RebrandSoon0000Sadly?
@@RebrandSoon0000 god damn it why. How can we script now?
I think I heard they're adding python stuff to replace it
this video is phenomenal, i love the constant "... that was too easy, lets go deeper"
reminds me heavily of Ronnie-Onnie Edwards' style.
my favorite part of thsi video is that it doesn't even approach answering the question. 10/10, great work
Read the chapter marks again, and really note down what the video teaches you in terms of game engine functionality, and tell me it doesn't answer what a game engine is / does
@@dsdy1205yeah, definitely doesn’t help much
It shows you how this is not just a game the moment it starts talking about how this piece of software could handle whatever game you want to develop on it.
...as far as I understand.
They answered it right at the start. Software that hosts a game. Anything that can make a game is the engine
I feel so sorry that you had spent THAT amount of time in VBA... But luckily, the TH-cam algorithm is going to reward you
yes lmao
But… my entire job is VBA? 🫢
wait, so it's bad that I wanna learn VBA?
@@VOgaming51official why do you hate yourself 😭
@@sohigh7433 I don't know...I also wanna learn assembly so...
Render into a cache, then copy all cells once completed.
You'll skip the jarring background redraw and because you've done all of your calculations on the first pass, it'll make the draw faster.
Double buffering
i think you can switch between sheets with vba so you don't even need to copy the cells, you can just render to a different sheet then switch when it's done, then do that with the previous sheet and so on (which is funny given that's what almost all graphical software does)
Isn't that the same thing all other video game engines technically do
Technically not all as seen in this example 🤣. But I’d hazard a guess that it’s pretty common.
@@narrativeless404 not exactly, usually the "copy to the other buffer" bit doesn't happen - let's say we have two buffers, A and B
you start by displaying the contents of buffer B while you write the next frame to buffer A, and when you're done you start displaying the contents of buffer A while you write the next frame to buffer B
every time you swap, you're essentially displaying a new frame to the screen
This brings back memories. Ages ago I took Intro to Programming and started to learn my first language, C++. By the end of the class, I had made several games using a library I found called n-curses. My best one was snake. Along with a survival mode, it had a campaign with 40 something levels. I had a map builder in excel to make adding levels a breeze.
We used n-curses to make Conway's Game of Life in my Systems Programming course using C
so that's what libncurses is
@@dsdy1205 It's how old school Linux menus were made xD
That was pretty cool ngl. not really into game developing, but i was thoroughly engaged. This needs more views
Bro won the youtube algorithm lottery.
And you deserved it with this cool project!
maybe it is just me being stoopid, but I think it would have been a good idea to show some code at the start, kind of just show how you make excel move the player cell and such. I think it is a vital part of the process and would make people understand better what you have actually done. Basically I think it would be better to show more of the process. But great video nonetheless, interested to see more of your projects.
the point is there is no coding going on. excel is doing this solely off the txtfiles. the entire conceit of the video is nobody knows how game engines work and excel is the simplest game engine that Just Works without you knowing how its reading your inputs
I love how the video turned so hard into wait lets make this an actual video game that I forgot the original premise was to define what a game engine is, but by the end of the video I had a so much more robust understanding of what a game engine is, insane writing/explaning skills!!!
i adore this video. this may be one of my favorites on the entire site. ive studied gamedevelopment mostly to get into the nitty gritty of the technology behind games, to see how they function in the basics. your explanation is spot on and your incredulousness during the entire process is amazing to hear. and then the implicit realisation all that modern games are, is actually just more complex and bigger versions of this excel thing. i love it so much.
Amazing delivery at 6:56. Good job, well done, congratulations, even.
What I love about this video is that it teaches
1. the very basic fundamentals of game design and
2. The power of using math and text in Excel.
This has a lot of potential for enhancing the functionality of AI tools, as SQL databases are extremely expensive.
However this video is proof that Microsoft Excel is free but robust enough to function as substittue for taking AI tools to the next level.
and that Math can be fun!
This was great. I taught myself VBA to make a program for my boss to render accurate models for his clients instead of drafting engineering diagrams that aren't as intuitive for laymen to read. It took a while, but since I got it working I've continued to add onto it and now we do most of our product planning from a spreadsheet.
Rather than just backfilling cells, I hide and unhide custom objects and move them around based on the cells and given dimensions. Each cell represents a quarter inch, so I just use basic multiplication to quadruple all the dimensions we're given.
I know there are better alternatives and that my code isn't efficient, but since it was all I had access to with no knowledge of writing code, I am still impressed by how capable Excel truly is. I was disappointed in your efforts to showcase that in this video UNTIL you began rendering 3D first person POV shots. Very well done!
Mfw you making autocad in excel
This can be considered also a product data management application
This is eldritch and fantastic and insanely impressive.
It's also incredibly well described in accessible language (mostly), this horrendous experiment is a *perfect* video. Well done, you should be proud.
I instantly wondered how deep into this madness will you go.
You did not disappoint.
not only is this a surprisingly informative video for someone who knows fuckall about game engines (it's me i know fuckall), but also the dramatic organ music playing as microsoft excel renders a 3D image is Very funny. i've been sort of binging your videos and you're really good at this simultaneous somewhat-subtle education and humor thing
Hey I just wanted to say the organ drop at 0:35 made me laugh out loud to an extent I forgot was possible for me today. Thank you !
This video was fascinating and delightful.
There was something off about the "fundamental flaw with the initial concept" that made me think if it would be possible to optimize performance (through a reduction of horizontal or vertical resolution) using vector graphics, drawing features, or image insertion (like sprite based videogames), and that led me down a rabbit hole that led to a place called excelunusual that has blog posts about 2D and 3D graphics and animation!
So if you ever want to make a sequel to this wonderful video, that's probably a good place to do the research necessary to make this run well enough that you would be able to combine your raycasting mechanic to create a setup in which it would be possible to make pretty much anything that doesn't require a player to look up and down.
Personally I'd love to see that. This was delightful to watch😁
Just a quick note of appreciation for you, I found this channel like an hour ago and put it on in the background while i was cramming French (I am still, unfortunately, cramming French) but you're great ! Videos are nicely put together, the humour is funny and I like how you kinda sound like you are about to cry every second. Matches my study mood.
i’ve just binged all your videos. your visuals, graphics, way of explaining, and voice are all so lovely and easy to follow! i’m happy i found you
And here I thought I was brilliant when I created a basic battleship spreadsheet, sent a copy to my coworker, and the two of us played through the company chat client throughout the day while we worked. Extremely well done; I audibly gasped when I saw the 3d render!
i cackled out loud at "luckily we can kill two birds with one more spreadsheet"
As a game dev I grinned the entire way through. Great stuff here.
that was a~maze~ing! very nicely done! looking forward to more :D
This is such a creative video. I love how you just went step by step to craft a game. That’s super cool
this video inspired me to pick back up working on my in-progress game engine in lua! thanks ellie
holy shit you are so good at explaining! as someone who struggles to structure my thoughts and steps when coding, this is super cool to watch! the way you break down each step makes it feel totally manageable and not overwhelming and makes me want to code again!
i remember learning about the hidden dev 3d first person "game" easter egg in certain versions of excel
your narrative style is absolutely captivating!
Gosh. I just. I keep coming back to this video because your voice is so lovely. Something about the cadence, the tones. It's so appealing to me. Keep on keepin' on.
what mastery of the understatement "Excel is woefully unequipped to be a game engine". This was fabulous :) Subbed :)
This is the most mad genius project I've seen unfold, thank you.
well it just means you didnt see much
This video is absolutely incredible writing.
I put this on intending to play a game to fill my hands but you held my attention the entire way through!
Thank you very much, I've seen other videos talk about it and I went in with an intuition of: "A game engine is a piece of software that can simulate and render a space, enabling the user to attach logic to that space and entities in it" but the writing, the music, the presentation and the preempting of my questions as you went through was perfect!
Thank you Ellie, and thank you Tatyana for the work that went into making such a tightly written video!
Ridiculously brilliant?
Brilliantly ridiculous?
Why not both?!
Chefs kiss!
I just love your thought process. This makes helped me. Understand how to build a videogame much better than any masterclass
Honestly, this is what they should be teaching to people, who seriously want to start programming games. Forget programming languages, before that, let's learn the concept by trying some stuff in Excel, software every programming enthusiast has come into contact with! This "fundamental flaw in the initial concept", as you put it, should be the core drive, motivation and passion for programmers. Forget the limitations we're under: Let's do the best we can with what we've been given! I applaud you for this masterpiece of a lecture!
The comedic timing in this video is sooo good! Love it :D
16:05 I don't see that as a problem since it now makes it look like a Spiritual Successor to "3D Monster Maze" since that game also allows playes to see each frame as it renders
I have seen people make many different games in Excel but I have never seen someone make such a complex game in it. The way you explained the whole process step-by-step really helped me understand the concept instead of getting bored. Great video! 👏
14:44 A slightly more in depth explanation: The distance to the wall determines how tall the wall is drawn in that column with closer walls drawn taller and further walls drawn shorter. The color is determined by the direction the wall faces with north/south walls drawn with light green and east/west walls drawn in dark green.
Does whether light or dark green is used for a particular face also depend on player orientation?
That is absolutely insane.
I don't know if I should say "good job" or "are you okay?", but the outcome is definitely impressive.
Procedurally generated maps would be a nice touch
Definitely! Wouldn't be terribly difficult with a bit of ingenuity.
Really fun to watch! This reminded me of my freshman year in a game design course where a team I was a part of incidentally DID make our game prototype (the main required part for the project) entirely in Excel, but the scope of this is way larger and much more fun!!
Making a map editor was actually such a genius approach. I was gonna say just ask chatgpt to generate you a vba script that makes a maze with a set width and height. I remember having to program a maze generator in C for learning recursions (this was over 2 years ago now so I have no idea how I did it, somehow I passed that class)
9:40 you dont exactly need the comma method. since every map will be read with the same algorithm, you can know which exits will be read in which order, and at the end of the file, you can have a list of exits, where each exit will be mapped to an E letter
Love the organ music! Kinda fits the decent into madness.
This is one of the best videos I've seen in a while. Really cool project but also really funny! Subscribed!
I don't mind seeing the frames render one at a time. I am annoyed that it draws top to bottom then left to right though. This was dope as hell.
"So I made this silly little top down maze game! You can move your little player cube around through the blocky hallways aaaand here it is rendered in 3D in excel!" I'm sorry, that escalated quickly can you run that back?
Excel game engine is crazy, GG ngl good job
Excellent video! Funny, good production value, great quality animations, and an interesting concept
Definition of a game engine a system in which you can use tools to create a game and then run the game on
Excel
TIL a youtube channel is a phenomenal coping tool for crippling mad scientist syndrome.
I love your videos, please keep making them.
You excelled my expectations
I see what u did there
the dramatic piano music killed me, absolutely wonderful work
Anything is a game engine. Python is a game engine. C is game engine. Machine code is a game engine. Electrons are a game engine.
This is the coolest thing ive seen this year. Genuinly
Cool.
Now put an Dinosaur searching the player inside the Mazes and You just made an Horror game
I hope everyone understands just what this all represents in game development and how amazingly well it was presented. Thank you.
I think a game engine is just a library that is useful for making games. This video does not directly answer the title but this is still a really cool video and really cool idea. Excel and Google sheets are epic.
Another question is if you think it needs to have an editor to be an engine. Because there's also those libraries for making games like XNA/FNA. They are kinda game engines but I like differentiating them by calling them game frameworks.
@@nooshstuff I was going to say the thing he'/s talking about is framework, actually framework is something we can load into a game engine to expand it, right?!?!?!?
The video clearly explained what a game engine is
At about 14:50 my dad started vacuuming in the other room and it honestly elevated the experience
15:30 if you could have found a way to make an enemy, this could have been an funny horror game cause im picturing the most unfair jumpscare/ starttle
This video is brilliant - looking forward to watching this channel grow
Dude. I’ve been wanting to do this for so long. I saw a video one day of someone building Doom in excel. I’m now one step closer. Thank you. Please. Please tell us how you coded this? I’m desperate.
My co-workers made an online multiplayer of Battleship about a decade ago in Excel. It was as basic as you could get since neither of them were programmers but they used the Shared Document feature and some VBA to check hits and misses and it worked.
I've always said it's actually not terrible for rapid prototyping since the UI and Graphics management is essentially done for you.
But does it run doom?
That's basically what this is, lol. Just need guns and enemies
i was fully expecting the doom HUD to just be rendered on top of the maze as a static image lol
Technically wolfenstien renderer not doom since it’s tile based instead of bsp based
visual basic
Theoretically yes
12:40 You wanna do _what_ now? Evil Genius, chef's kiss, impressive ambition 🤯❤️
A really good video
The ending of this video made me feel like a mad scientist cackling over a hideous creation.
Where can I download this?
Brilliant! I came to watch the novelty of using Excel to make a game and stayed for the awesome game design/implementation overview.
Code Bullet recently made a video doing a similar thing with Microsoft Paint, and even the Windows File explorer. strange timing, but i’m not complaining. more game engines for me.
the thing is, code bullet used python scripts for the actual game, while ms paint and file explorer were essentially just the display. this video is different because it makes the actual entire game within excel
Damn you got me with that pause thing. We're too predictable. Also, I expected this video and your channel to have way more views/subs. I suspect that it's only a matter of time if you're content continues to be this fucking good dude. I'm excited to see your next video!
did doom run on excell? i remember that doom windows edition was included in excell at some point.... for some reason but i am not sure if ID jus packaged their engine into or ran it natively.
Dude when I saw you were gonna make it 3d I went "no fucking way".
But this actually gives me an idea and I appreciate the value I found here. I was fascinated the whole way through and learned all kinds of cool things!
Okay, I understand that programmers may give non-helpful answers, but Google gives the exact same answer?!? XD
This was super cool! When you talked about doing a first person view I thought you might be doing an "Eye of the Beholder" style psudo 3D sort of thing but you really went all out.
the third example should probably be godot...
This is interesting from the perspective of someone who is old enough to remember Prodigy as one of the earliest consumer versions of the internet (which included pictures being displayed in layers when graphics were needed) and the original Doom as one of the first games to really handle 3D rendering in real time. Effectively, you recreated how they solved those problems. This is very cool simply because that is clearly the most effective and efficient way to handle things given the limitations.
This is also a perfect example of what game designers have to deal with in any game engine: knowing its the limitations and figuring out how to use its strengths to work around those limitations.
Me, who's already written snake in an excel spreadsheet:
"Damn, can't believe he's really using Excel as a game engine. What a Chad."
This has clarified so many basic concepts for me... Thank you 👏
who else solved the hard maze without pausing the video?
When I was studying the Numenta neural network at university, I realised that for all the fancy OOP that went into it, you were making a database of cells, their connections, and their connection strengths. So you could run an AI in SQL.... Or Excel! With the right mapping, you could save your whole brain state in a CSV. It's that a nice thought lol.