Building a 1993-style shooter on purpose: 256 colors, a cat protagonist, and a colormap trick from Excel (staniks.github.io)
The build is a 320x240, 256-color raycaster that precomputes distance shading into 'colormaps,' so darkening is O(1) per column instead of per pixel.
Graphics veterans corrected the era: the engine is really Wolfenstein-3D-class, not Doom — and some details are 'a bit too cool for 1993.'
The deeper point landed anyway: this is exactly the kind of from-scratch craft current LLMs are terrible at.
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