I Tried Making A Fully Ray Traced Game

A developer secretly participated in their own game jam, building a fully ray-traced solitary confinement simulator called Philo Calia in 14 days. The post covers building a custom compute ray tracer limited to cube geometry for real-time performance, implementing Witted-style ray tracing with reflections and shadows, UV mapping and normal maps for textures created in Adobe Substance Painter, a mathematically accurate real-time sun position system based on astronomical formulas, and original music composed using basic music theory. The game runs at 500fps by avoiding path tracing and restricting scene geometry to axis-aligned cubes.