Instructor builds 3d engine in Excel

An Excel instructor has built a 3d engine in his favorite spreadsheet program. He demonstrates his creation using a kind of maze level, which is somewhat similar to Doom. The frame rate isn’t really anything to write home about.

The instructor, known online as C Bel, has shared his work via a blog post on Gamasutra. There he explains that it consists almost entirely of formulas and not macros. He therefore explains that the reason for his project is that he wanted to demonstrate that formulas work better in many cases and that there is almost nothing that cannot be solved using formulas.

The game’s map is created randomly and is not based on a fixed design, explains the creator. In his extensive blog post he also explains more about occlusion, rendering and creating opponents, which take the shape of a large red circle. He has uploaded several files to run the game locally and there are variants with and without vba.