A truly 2D game isn't what you think it is... 

Nice work! :)

- first person 2d game - look inside - wolfenstein 3d

Holy hell man the editing on this is crazy. The entire video is really high quality, and overall it’s great. Everything is explained well, edited well and it’s awesome. Props to you.

this editing is phenomenal! gives me 2 hour youtube documentary about something you have no idea about vibes.

How to make 1D game Step 1: take one row of pixels from a 3D game Step 2: stretch the row of pixels to be visible Step 3: add fog You have now made a 1d game!

We had to read Flatland in high school. I had very low expectations: 1: it's old 👵 (1884), and 2: it's a math book 🥱. Turns out it reads in a surprisingly modern way, and is written in an engaging "storytime" sort of way. I recommend checking it out if any of that seems remotely interesting.

the section at 11min where u talk about it being a 3d illusion looks pretty similar to how we originally did the first 3d games.

Time for speedrunners to find a glitch to go into the third dimension... WHY YOU GOTTA MAKE MY JOB HARD

Brother basically created doom

I've seen a million videos were people randomly talk about ray marching, but this is the first time the explanation actually hit me correctly. Congrats man, this is actually a great explanation of it The thing that snapped me out of it, was the explanation of signed distance functions. It finally makes sense that the proportional distance motion is actually computationally good, this is very cool.

I think the fog and colors can be tweaked a bit, no, a lot, to make it more readable. Fog could be the loss of saturation to an extent, going to blackness only at an extreme range, or if there's no source of light. Try adding sources of light, cause why not. It's confusing when the shadows move when you move, light and fog should be different. How about expanding FOV using the thickness of the line to represent what's in front and what's peripheral vision? Try to make a building, like the one in the Flatland cover. To balance it so the objects, sizes and stuff make sense. Make a kind of boundary around the camera/eyes of the character, so you can't or it's obvious when you stick your face in something making the visibility null. Kind of like inverse fog or a character's visual or non-visual sense for distance. Using Y axis and patterns, perhaps like a checkered transparent pattern of increased intensity for the object too close. Or add a second eye, making parallax possible. Run it cross-eyed, or... It's still a 1d game, even if you need 3d setup to run it with parallax.

I love how most of the comments i see either have a creator comment or a creator like, and it shows the actual passion that he must put into his community. i think that deserves my subscription

Dude this video is amazing, I never would have known how much thought needs to go into something that sounds very simple - rendering some 2D shapes and walking around. The editing and explanations were also top tier, and have massively improved since you've started posting. Definitely one of the better videos you've made!

I got this recommended and watched through the whole video without realizing it's not a million views video from a huge channel. Good job, It was super interesting and informative! You gained a follower :)

Nice project. The only criticism I have, is that the "flatlander" is walking on empty space. In reality, it would need some kind of surface/planet to traverse on, and the planet would just be a massive circle the same way that gravity makes our planets massive spheres.

It would be interesting to see how it looks for you to move the 2d plane through a 3d space, could be pretty cool

''We viewing a 2D world with a 1D view on a 2D screen in a 3D world through a 2D viewpoint'' I love it😂🔥

All of this is really cool, ngl, and the fact our brains can comprehend it is impresive as well

Godly editing style, good job

Yoooo this was sick dude! I would love to see you expand this! And maybe make a real game from it!

This was super interesting! The editing and graphics really helped me understand this better (because it was *really* hard to grasp when we talked about it lmao).

Having 2 eyes can also give depth perception.

Using SDFs for this feels like shooting sparrows with cannons. Ray-casting would be way more efficient giving you the same results. Nice video though.

This is crazy, loved the video

Now do a 1D game from the point of view of a non one dimensional creature

the line is too flat for our eyes but if you add some height it will just feel like Doom. and Doom is technically 2D first person it uses ray casting for rendering, the space itself is 2D but graphic looks 3D that's just illusion

Wow this video is incredible!!

this is great! i bet sebastian lague would dig it

You should try porting this to 3ds, the need for fog would be mostly eliminated.

This is so interesting and easy to understand. Kinda reminds me of the of Doom engine.

Cool information illustation, and now I finally know of a way of doing that myself, thanks for the link

Bro is going to be the next mashpoe

Reminds me of a scratch tutorial I watched once, they also used raycasting but the final effect was „3d“

NEW NIVMIZ VIDEO LETS GOOO 🔥🔥🔥🔥I DONT GET HES TALKING ABOUT BUT LETS GOOOO 🗣🔥🗣🔥🗣🔥💯💯

11:06 Ah, I just figured that you would have a strange fog look.

As someone who read flatland in my physics class, this is cool

Man, who would knew that making a 2d game with a 1d perspective would take this much time

Wow, I can't phrase how much i appreciate this channel for making such high-quality videos and aspiring to grow better every time!! #thefogiscoming

you could just use tall 3d models with base of needed shape and apply depth buffer in shader. the result would be the same if not smoother gradient for rounded shapes and much more performant. also mask could be applied to control players visibility

Did you fix the fisheye effect? Because of the perspective, it's hard to be sure, but there were a few times that it looked fisheye-ee. Without fixing the fisheye effect, it's possible to see a bright spot in the middle of an edge and think that there is a vertex in that bright spot.

I think you should have the pixels stretch to fill the screen since that's easier to see and more like what a flatlander would see

It's a cool project. I think you should make a game out of it. For example, a FPS with wall-like covers and AI enemies, that use pathfinding. I also recommend adding a multiplayer.

Very nice to see more people branching out to make games in other dimensions. But I'm curious, why did you use raymarching for your rendering?

Next step is to keep only the center pixel. This way, you get a glimpse of the pov from a 1d viewer about a 0d scene. 😅 And that’d be awesome!

Really Really Impressive to me, just before the end i was actually just thinking, what if he stretched the entire window's height? and also the bullets thing which i swear i actually tought he was gonna add that before i reached to the end, but still impressive work!

interesting. it's cool to see people experiment with spatial dimensions like this. reminds me of SCP-3966, which iirc also took inspiration from Flatland one thing im curious about is why you're using ray marching at all. would it not be easier to, for each pixel, perform a ray/object intersection test against every object in the scene, remembering which one is nearest? though i suppose SDFs might not be usable that way; you'd need a unique ray/intersection test for each shape or, failing that, a ray/edge intersection test used once per edge per object. hm... math was never my strong suit anyway, fascinating project

the video looks amazing! it feels quite close to a Sebastian Lague video

i love how i had this idea for a vr horror game

I really liked that experiment. But im really glad that there are 2d and 3d games and no 1d games Xd

ok 2 cameras in 2D to get 2D binocular vision vision using 3d glasses

Or you could render standard 3d but don't allow up/down pan and only display the center scan line...

extrude the row upwards than divide the height by the distance of said pixels for a doom like 3d effect, I've used this for 3d in scratch

There are actually plenty of 1d rendering engines that already exist, moreover, these 1d rendering engines are actually used to render 3d graphics, raytracing is commonly used for this, for each X coordinate send out a ray then depending on how long it took for that ray to hit something change the height of the vertical line for that x position, however, this is 2d, or is it? Realistically, the height is irrelevant, it's just there to help portray the ray length, you could easily replace it with something like brightness, brighter colors are closer darker are further. Also, this notably means that you could theoretically portray a 4d environment through the same method, however, in both cases this does a little bit of trickery, in the 1d case all it's really doing is swapping the y axis out for a z axis which makes the game appear 3d when in fact it just traded one axis of movement for another, and in the 2d case it'd be doing the same thing but to achieve the illusion of 4d graphics, and of course it's actually swapping more than just one axis of movement, it also sacrifices the color element to achieve this, color isn't typically thought of as an axis of movement but in a sense it really is, technically making all 2d games 5d due to red, green, and blue components of color, all of this adds up to make this idea a little funky.

It's totally possible to remove that edge distortion from high FOV. It's a solved problem for raycasters and it involves either spacing out the rays unevenly so they land on the view plane with an even spacing, or emitting them from a view plane (although this would presumably harm perspective projection).

I don't think sdf is necessary here. Visually each object is made out of lines that have a gradient to them, you can probably just render them back to front like a normal polygonal game and it would probably take less processing power. Video was well put together though!

If i had a coin each time i see a video about creating FPS game in a 2D space, i would have 2 coins. Which isn't a lot, but strange that it happened twice

Don’t forget to look at Mashpoe’s 1D game as well, it’s similar to this implementation. He also has a stereo anaglyph mode for it!

Rather than a thin line you should stretch it to fill the whole screen but each column of pixels is a single color.

I can imagine a 1D fps game

Have you ever heard of Wolfenstein 3D and the raycasting method it used to build it's "3D" environments? basically what you did, but the pixel's height is dependent on it's distance to the camera. Also you might want to consider shading one side of the shapes darker than the other to help with readability.

It's strange that you recreate the Doom which is 2,5D game that shows the 2D world in 3D and you have chosen an algorithm that struggles to render a single line. It is an interesting experiment that reminds of an 7D indie game that I played years ago. It uses simpler rendering to orient yourself more accessibly The developer of the game is Marries van de Hoef, the game was called Seven Dimensions and was developed during 7dFPS about 10 years ago. I was unable to find it now

Good vid

Damn, cooking once again

I've seen this type of representation for 2D a couple of times and there's one thing that doesn't sit right with me. Your renderer aligns to what a character in a top-down world would see (e.g. Binding of Isaac). However, wouldn't it make more sense from a gameplay perspective to do a side-view inspired rendering system, similar to what Mario would see? The camera would be vertical rather than horizontal, and you would be able to look up and down. You could move forward and back, and you'd be able to jump. You could even allow the character to flip vertically and turn around like Mario can, if you want the player to be able to see where they're going when they move backwards. With that type of world, you could actually implement gravity, and consequently, a physics system. You'd be able to represent many games more easily. You could also place your 2D character in a 3D world and add back in left and right mouse movement, and it would translate to that medium easier than with a flat plane system.

can you create Mario or Flappy Bird with vertical line renderer with Mario or bird's point of view. I mean, now that you've made a top-down game with a horizontal renderer, can you make a side-view game with a vertical renderer?

I think it would be a bit better if you used the distance to the shape to smooth it out a bit more

Would be interesting to see an alternative version where distance was shown as height, even if that's not true 1D projection

Damn, these are some thicc ass pixels

make it into a game yessss!

please continue this one!

Can't you sum up the ray step lengths to figure out the distance to the camera?

in the end, every game is 2D. because 3D games are still flat images on a flat surface. and by trying to create a 2D first person game, you just created a 3D game again

5:16 if im reading this right (havent read sources) youre actually doing a panoramic projection of the scene, not a planar one so the shapes are distorted and bendy. its harder to tell because 1d but if you were to add tops/bottoms to the "walls" like wolf3d then youd be able to see it

Why not only look for the corners of the shapes and stretch a colour from each point? Ray marching feels a lot harder on the device.

as 3d pixels are called voxels (volume pixels) the display pixels for this type of game should be called lexels (length pixels)

What ist that Song/piece at 11:37 called 😃

This reminded me of FEZ 2

Why not use raycasting lol. This is just wolfenstein but with a vertical resolution of 1. Really cool though

You could recreate the pentagon shaped house on the cover of flatland.

I would ACTUALLY play a game like this !!! Stretching the screen isn't cheating imo, when it comes down to perception who is to say that a 2d creature wont see it like this? Also is there a reason why you're not just using raycasting tho?

ah yes, a compute shader for rendering. what could go wrong?

1 and a half weeks too late buuuuuuut very good👍 good job niv the miz

you want to know why we can see past objects in a 2d game? its because a 3d being just can. same applies 4thd object

"no cost to performance"

10:16 Oh, I thought you were just simplifying it up until now to avoid going into more detail about how it would use the minimum distance from the ray and an object to step forwards.

isn't doom93 technically 1d for shooting then, if you only display the center horizontal pixels.

i remember this

wolfenstein 3d but with only 1 line of pixel

It's about 2D movement not about the visual aspect of a game.

so what wolfenstine?

nice rober music lol

this is a lubly jubly video.

No, depth is actually determined by looking at the distance of the same point through both eyes. Silly!

u can get the fog from the depth buffer

Curious what ray tracing would look like in this perspective.

Is it time for the flatland rpg?

fun fact: this is a 3d game because time

my brain doesnt get how to tell what shape it is

Wait so I wasn't the first person to think about this? Huh 🤔

This is a raycaster this is a pseudo 3D game