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+# SDL Raycaster
+
+A Wolfenstein 3D-style raycasting renderer in C, chasing the same trick old engines like Wolfenstein 3D and early Doom builds used to fake 3D on hardware that couldn't really do 3D: cast one ray per screen column into a 2D grid map, and draw a vertical wall strip whose height depends on how far that ray traveled before hitting something. No GPU pipeline, no triangles — just trigonometry and a grid.
+
+Getting the ray-casting step right was most of the project. It walks a ray outward along vertical and horizontal grid-line crossings separately, picking whichever hits a wall first, and has to correct the returned distance for the fisheye effect you'd otherwise get from measuring along the ray angle instead of straight ahead. A 2D minimap drawn alongside the 3D view, showing the map grid with every cast ray overlaid on it, made that math dramatically easier to debug — you could actually watch the rays fan out and see exactly where one was going wrong.
+
+There's also a separate little map editor (`maker.c`) for painting out wall layouts by hand instead of hardcoding a test map into the renderer — click tiles, pick a wall type with the number keys, save it out as a plaintext `.map` file.
+
+Movement, collision, and a working minimap all came together; enemies and weapons were the natural next step.
+
+## Controls
+
+Renderer (`doom`):
+
+- `W` / `S` — move forward/back
+- `A` / `D` — strafe
+- `Q` / `E` — turn
+- Mouse — look
+
+Map maker (`maker`):
+
+- Number keys — pick a wall type
+- Click — paint the hovered tile
+- Saves the layout to a `.map` file for the renderer to load
+
+## Building
+
+Needs SDL2, SDL2_ttf, and libm.
+
+```sh
+make        # builds the renderer -> ./doom
+make maker  # builds the map editor -> ./maker
+```
+
+## License
+
+GPLv3 — see `LICENSE`.