"ASCII City": This cyberpunk city consists of letters and characters
Solo developer "Grow Now! Games" has made their unusual cyberpunk prototype "ASCII City" playable. In it, you explore a three-dimensional city in your browser that is created entirely from text characters.
Skyscrapers, streets, cars, trees, and pedestrians: «ASCII City» initially appears like a highly abstracted cyberpunk world. The colored characters form facades, vehicles, and figures into a surprisingly spatial backdrop.
You move through the streets from a first-person perspective, enter buildings, and take elevators to different floors. There are no missions or a progression system in the current prototype. The focus so far is on free exploration. Audio is also missing.
Grow Now! Games is offering the first version via Ko-fi. Access costs at least 2.50 British pounds. Previously, the developer had showcased the project primarily in videos on YouTube. The first of these reached more than a million views within a short time.
A 3D world made of text characters
ASCII (short for «American Standard Code for Information Interchange») is a standardized character set that includes letters, numbers, and punctuation marks, among other things. In ASCII art, images are created from these characters.
«ASCII City» applies this principle to a spatially navigable environment. Grow Now! Games is developing its own engine for this, eschewing ready-made game kits like Unity or Unreal Engine as well as classic 3D models. It calculates the environment and then transfers the result onto a fixed character grid. Using raycasting, the system sends virtual rays from the viewpoint into the environment. Based on their hits, it calculates distances and visible surfaces, thereby determining which characters appear at which position.
On desktop computers, this grid now comprises 180 columns and 80 rows. This allows a scene to consist of up to 14,400 individual character fields. The calculations are handled, among other things, by a module developed in Rust and executed as WebAssembly with a size of around 283 kilobytes. WebAssembly makes it possible to execute compiled code directly in the browser. WebGL then handles the graphical rendering.
The prototype continues to grow
Since its initial presentation, Grow Now! Games has significantly expanded the city. There are now buildings with interiors and multiple levels – up to skyscrapers. The developer mentions a dialogue system, among other things, as a possible further addition.
According to the developer, the browser version also works on smartphones with touch controls. However, it is currently only limitedly optimized for this. Grow Now! Games therefore recommends Chrome or Edge on a computer with hardware acceleration enabled.
My interests are varied, I just like to enjoy life. Always on the lookout for news about darts, gaming, films and series.
From the latest iPhone to the return of 80s fashion. The editorial team will help you make sense of it all.
Show all