r/ASCII

You can view the full composition on my website ( cryobs.net/pank )

Wishlist on Steam here via this link.

I’m learning an awful lot while making this game, and honestly, I’m very aware that I still have a long way to go. I’m sorry if some of the influences feel obvious at this stage, but I’m trying to absorb, learn from, and honour the things that first made me fall in love with this kind of work.

The story takes huge inspiration from the sparks of William Gibson’s 80s imagination, the social paranoia running through Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, the brilliant design thinking of Zachtronics, and old-school favourites like Uplink, alongside more recent games such as Grey Hack and Hacknet.

I’m trying to take those influences with humility, learn as much as I can, and slowly shape them into something that feels personal and new.

Hey everyone!

I'm a C/C++ developer who spends a stupid amount of time messing with terminals.

I've been experimenting with terminal rendering, ANSI graphics, animations, ASCII art, custom UI elements and low-level terminal stuff — basically treating the terminal as more than just a command line.

The GIFs above are a collection of things I've built along the way. Some are useful, some are completely unnecessary, and some exist purely because I wondered about the limitations of the terminal...

I'm still exploring where this rabbit hole goes. No polished product pitch, just a bunch of experiments and weird ideas.

If anything here catches your attention, feel free to ask about it — the implementation, the ideas behind it, C/C++, Linux, terminals, whatever.

I'll reply to anything.

I am messing around in the terminal, and it's different capabilities.

one if it is the one you are seeing in this post – it took me to trails in two different languages, C and CPP... and almost 10+ attempts even with Copilot to make it work at the object level. Feel free to tell me what you think about it.

- The API is super clean itself: just two or four lines worth of animation.

- Each box is an object, which means I can do as many as I want to be

- I can push an absurd amount of colours into it, and yeah, it's true, it's RGB-based

still in the testing phase, though.

I've been working on SIMULAII, a small C++ framework for creating procedural, animated visuals directly inside the terminal.

The basic idea is to treat the terminal's character grid like a tiny visual surface. Instead of storing animation frames, SIMULAII generates every frame mathematically.

It currently comes with 30 built-in simulations, including waves, ripples, plasma, vortices, flow fields, and rotating 3D/4D geometry like cubes, spheres, Möbius strips and a tesseract.

The part I find most interesting is that the rendering primitives are customizable too. You can change the color and replace the characters used to represent the simulation, so the same underlying simulation can produce completely different visuals.

It's intentionally zero-dependency — no OpenGL, ncurses, or graphics framework. Just C++ and ANSI terminal capabilities.

simulaii box(2, 4, 60, 20, "#00FFAA", 6);

while (true)
    box.nextFrame();

The project is still pretty experimental, but I like to update it with understanding and other people''s views upon it -

GitHub:
https://github.com/intriXlabs/SIMULAII

Would love to know what you'd use something like this for.

Got bored and decided to try my hand at a terminal-native vortex generator that uses ASCII characters to render.

https://github.com/ajbeaver/phase

It is definitely a bit rough around the edges and I am no mathematician or anything but definitely a fun project and if you leave it running for long enough you can roast marshmallows over your cpu.

I tried to optimize the load as much as I could but if anyone has recommendations let me know.