Implementing collision detection and/or particle systems "from scratch"

I’m working on a computer graphics group project in my university, and we’ve been assigned quite a demanding project supervisor, who thinks that Unity has too many implemented, easy to use features that don’t even require much coding and we should try to program some of the computer graphics techniques on our own.

I’m a programmer, but for now I know very little about Unity and CG in general, therefore my question is: would it be possible to implement features such as a basic particle system and collision detection from code level? For collisions, I’ve been thinking about simply getting mesh vertices when a player triggers an attack and then just checking (with appropriate algorithm) if they collide with enemies present on the map.

Of course it’s possible, and there’s even lots of example code out there.

Is it a useful way to spend your effort? That’s up to your project supervisor I guess.

Good luck!