r/ASCII

Hey everyone. I've been playing around with vanilla JS and raycasting to see if I could make an interactive 3D environment using only text.

The cool part is that it actually generates the whole 3D space directly from a plain 2D text blueprint that you can just type out.

I put a live demo up here if anyone wants to mess around with it: https://raymondev.github.io/asciilib/

(Be gentle, it's the very first version so please don't play it too hard hahaha, I'm actively developing it).

Everything is open source, so you are welcome to download it, use it, tinker with it or whatever you please!

Curious to hear your thoughts!!!

I’m experimenting with an ASCII-inspired visual style for a project I’m planning to develop.

I’m currently working on a small tool that converts regular 2D sprites into ASCII-style sprites. The idea is to use it to quickly apply the same visual language across characters, buildings, lights, and gameplay markers.

I’ve also created a hologram shader that adds effects such as scanlines, glitches, flickering, glow, and moving light sweeps.

I’m currently trying to achieve is basically:

“It should feel like a stylized ASCII hologram, while still being easy to understand what you’re looking at.”

I’d especially appreciate feedback on:

• Are the characters and objects readable enough?
• Does the hologram effect add atmosphere, or is it too distracting?
• Does the ASCII visual language feel consistent across different types of sprites?
• And most importantly, do you think this visual style is interesting enough to stand out?

This is still a very early concept test, so critical and honest feedback would be especially helpful. I’d also really appreciate any thoughts on where you think I should focus improvements or further development.

Been tinkering with a little first-person city made entirely from symbols — buildings, roads, cars, pedestrians, signs, and all. Still very much a work in progress, but I’m having a lot of fun seeing how far the ASCII look can go.

EDIT: I've uploaded a nearly 3 minute walkthrough video in higher quality, for those interested in seeing more! https://www.reddit.com/r/ASCII/comments/1vnbcwc/ascii_city_prototype_video_walkthrough/

Oh wow, I didn’t know there was an ASCII sub! Nice!

I made a playable ASCII rpg horror type game a while ago in html, hand-drawing (asciiing?) each view from each direction and spot (from an initially made template). This baby was a passion project that took over 800 hours to draw and code.

You can play the game here: https://zebeth.co.uk/playplanet/thewindmill/index.html

Hi all!

I've been working on building a better image to ASCII generator. A lot of the options out there are quite simple — luminance based, single classifier networks or hand-engineered conversion processes that tend to fail in many cases. So over the last two months I've been working on trying to create a somewhat more sophisticated converter.

The general technical approach is to use CLIP as a judge on the ASCII art (akin to CLIPasso, for those familiar), while trying to make the discrete Unicode glyph space differentiable in a sensical way: a small VAE embeds the font's glyphs so a cell's choice can move continuously, each cell also keeps a small population of weighted candidate glyphs — heuristic channels nominate alternatives, and a nomination is only admitted after being swapped into the actual render and measured.

There is also support for creating ANSI art (examples also attached!)

At this point I've tested the code on macOS (MPS) and Linux/CUDA; Windows is unexplored. A render takes roughly an hour and 8 GB of memory, depending on image size — there's a fast preview mode if you just want to watch it converge.

Here is the repo!: https://github.com/jakobrees/unicasso

(I'm still working on writing up a paper to detail all the little bits -- any helpful feedback would be very welcome :-) !)

(The colored images that have been turned into ANSI are are images by Ladypurple on Civitai)

Copilot ended up creating "D" instead

You can export the result as .txt, .png, or a .gif. You can also add wave animations, colors, plasma fields to the ASCII chars.

Try it here: https://codeplusart.github.io/ASCII-fit/

Would love to hear feedback / ideas for more animation modes if anyone plays with it.

I built a visualizer that uses encapsulations of code as nodes and how those encapsulations use each other as dependencies / consumers as the node connections.

The renderer is something I've been building for a game but I rebuilt from zero so the game could run faster. All the characters you see are from my typeface , thaum-mono

I've just been really into building things so I figured I'd share, this is mostly for my own use.
The system really relies on the shape of the harness that I'm building because it uses the co-located docs that are within encapsulations to do real time rendering of the actual system.

color is the test results that are cached for that encapsulation,
size of encapsulations by storage size determines the size of the node. 1x1x1 to 3x3x3.
the different cell fills depict where that encapsulation lives in the root.
W is "Worker", █ is "Domain", O "Orchestration", ect.

This is the model of my custom ai harness that uses local models to do some play things. working towards ai npcs but built actually well. :3

Small one compared with the main thing I'm building, but I'm pretty happy with this.

Glyph Forge turns images, text, video, webcam feeds, screen captures and URLs into ASCII/Unicode art. There's a CLI and Python API, but the browser Studio is the easiest way to mess around with it.

It runs locally in the browser, needs no account, and exports PNG, SVG or plain text.

Try it here:

https://ace1928.github.io/glyph_forge/

Source:

https://github.com/Ace1928/glyph_forge

It's MIT licensed. I mostly made it because I wanted one character-art tool that didn't feel like six separate half-tools.

You can wishlist it now to get notified when it becomes available: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4109210/Blood_in_the_Panopticon/

It is releasing August 19th.

For my first roguelike project I'm working on proc-gen. As a data scientist, random walks are attractive to me. In time series analysis we use random walks with drift to characterize some phenomena like stock market fluctuations. I added "momentum" as a parameter to help give the walker drift, which creates corridors.

I'm using Golang because...

1. I've written Python for money for like 8 years now and it's boring me
2. Golang ships a binary so in theory my outputs can run anywhere.
3. It's pretty dang quick while still handling garbage collection for you.
4. For terminal based tools the ecosystem is incredibly mature. Many of the best modern terminal tools are written in go.

I put the code in GitHub if you would like to play with it yourself!

Might do a YouTube walk through if anyone is interested. Let me know.

https://github.com/PigsEyedea/drunkardwalk

https://foxjammin.itch.io/glyphwars

Free to play but donations will help me add more levels, more enemies and more mechanics.

Hi r/ASCII!

I'm making a game that plays entirely out of the terminal and uses an ASCII user interface. You get to create your own cult, and the beliefs that you select are the upgrades and perks that influence gameplay. I figured for fans of a niche aesthetic, you might also be fans of a niche game idea!

The game is called CultGame, and you can wishlist it on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2345980/CultGame

Thanks for checking this out :D