Comment by caspar

I can vouch for this "study plan".

4 years ago I tackled exactly those courses (raytracer[0] first, then CPU rasterizer[1]) to learn the basics. And then, yes, I picked up a lib that's a thin wrapper around OpenGL (macroquad) and learned the basics of shaders.

So far this has been enough to build my prototype of a multiplayer Noita-like, with radiance-cascades-powered lighting. Still haven't learned Vulkan or WebGPU properly, though am now considering porting my game to the latter to get some modern niceties.

[0]: https://github.com/caspark/the-all-seeing-crab [1]: https://github.com/caspark/little-crab-tv