University student builds simple raycaster maze demo with transparency support in Microsoft Excel

In the ongoing quest to do strange, and seemingly impossible things with Microsoft Excel, Redditor u/awesomegraczgie21 posted a demonstration of a functioning, playable raycaster in the form of a first-person maze game running entirely through Microsoft Excel using its Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language.

Specifically, this maze tech demo is seen utilizing raycasting to support transparency and per-column texture mapping. Transparency is noted as being done from the player's view outward (close-to-far rendering), and a simple collision system is used to keep the game functioning within the constraints of its walled maze. The maze is, of course, explored entirely in first-person, navigated pretty much one frame at a time via the included 4 movement and 2 strafe buttons.

Compared to past attempts at rendering graphics in Microsoft Excel, like the "Fallout for Excel" game, this is far more ambitious, though similarly limited in scope and playability. While there is sped-up video footage (10 FPS!) of navigation through the maze being spread online from the original posting, the actual gameplay is more like a "interactive slideshow" . With its creator stating that the FPS ranges between "2FPS up to 5 SPF (0.2 FPS). Rendering multiple overlapping transparent walls kills the performance, but it's worth it." The entire demo is coded in just 400 lines of VBA.

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