Real time ascii rendering in a gameplay demo? Yes please.
Ascii art and imagery have been around for a long time. This silky smooth demo really shows off how nice an ascii world rendered in real-time could look.
I mean, just look at the water, it’s completely mesmerizing.
Water ripples, hard to show it on twitter tho. pic.twitter.com/rn8Y3olA08
— gumix (@MrGumix) December 5, 2019
The amazing creator, MrGumix on Twitter, has a feed full of great videos and demos showing off some beautiful gameplay, as well as some great callouts to other Ascii based games.
You can play the demo, Asciicker here. It’s fairly simplistic gameplay wise, but at the same time shows off what can be a beautifully complex world. And for an added bonus, it runs fairly smoothly on your phone.
Having a quick peek behind the scenes revealed very little. A lot of incredibly low-level javascript, as far as a rendering engine is concerned, which would definitely explain the incredible performance.
Playing fetch my mouse with #asciicker 's wolf. pic.twitter.com/Vwl0zcWrzY
— gumix (@MrGumix) December 6, 2019
For a little extra fun, you can check out the urls from http://asciicker.com/x1/ all the way to http://asciicker.com/x13/ (x1 to x13) to see the different releases, giving a little insight into the process.
MrGumix has said that he’s currently working on another game. Ascii Patrol (which itself looks great!) and afterwards, is planning to get back to Asciicker. He has even made a Discord Server for people who want to follow along and voice their thoughts.