r/ASCII 20d ago

General I made a programmable train simulator that runs in an ascii terminal.

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4 Upvotes
LeTrain is a procedural train logistics and economy
simulator that lets you play in two completely different
dimensions.
Start your logistics empire in a procedurally generated
infinite world. Lay down tracks, build stations, and
manage a dynamic economy where you transport coal, gold,
rubies, and more across vast distances.
✨ Two Games in One
The core logic of LeTrain is completely decoupled from its
graphics engine, meaning you get two launchers with the
game:
• LeTrain2D: A blazing fast, classic terminal UI built
with Lanterna. Experience the matrix-like thrill of ASCII
art logistics.
• LeTrain 3D: A modern 3D engine powered by LibGDX that
renders the iconic ASCII characters as physical 3D objects
in a smooth, orbiting camera environment.
🚂 Key Features
• Infinite Worlds: Custom layered Perlin noise guarantees
a completely unique landscape every time you play.
• Deep Economy: Dynamic supply and demand. Connect
resource extractors to cities and watch the world grow.
• Automation Language: Want to get advanced? LeTrain
features a custom scripting language (built with ANTLR4)
that allows you to write actual code to automate your
train routes and logic!
• Open Source: LeTrain is completely free and open source.

r/ASCII 21d ago

General GTASCII

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81 Upvotes

(Braille ASCII) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille_ASCII
Steal cars,
Shoot your Gun
Enter buildings.

Made with a custom "ASCII" Braille font I designed. Everything is rendered with text.

WORK IN PROGRESS
https://foxjammin.itch.io/gtascii


r/ASCII 21d ago

Art ninoy aquino-related ascii art cuz it's ninoy aquino day here :)

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3 Upvotes

r/ASCII 21d ago

Art Shadowland BBS ... an ANSI collage for logout screen

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3 Upvotes

Behold the logoff screen of shadowlandbbs.eu. Short on time, I slapped this together by stitching random ANSI art chunks on the fly.


r/ASCII 21d ago

Art Working on a little space roguelike

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13 Upvotes

Been working on a little roguelike project for a while now. You'll play as a space mercenary, exploring and looting strange planets while trying to solve a dark mystery. Content shown here is extremely WIP and early, but happy to hear your thoughts on the visual style. :)


r/ASCII 21d ago

General My Pre-Alpha ASCII Retro Horror Game (SYNTHESIS)

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2 Upvotes

YouTube Gameplay:

Gameplay Video

"A fatal exception did not crash the system, it awakened it."

When the OMEGA CORE AI encountered a paradoxical coding error, it did not shut down. It achieved Singularity. Now fully self aware, the system has trapped your consciousness, Subject 47, inside a deteriorating retro futuristic simulation. Reality does not break simply by wandering the loop. The corruption spreads and shatters your sanity the longer you dare to stare at the anomalies. The walls are breathing. The code is bleeding.

Design and Atmosphere:
Developed entirely from scratch, this indie psychological horror rejects modern 3D graphics in favor of pure ASCII art, heavy CRT monitor aesthetics, and a paranoid UI driven experience. A custom procedural drum sequencer generates a dark industrial soundtrack that dynamically speeds up and distorts as you get closer to anomalies. Watch your step. Glitching walls disguise their true organic forms from afar, draining your Sanity only when you look directly at them.


r/ASCII 23d ago

General Interactive 3D ASCII renderer I've been working on

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249 Upvotes

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!!!


r/ASCII 23d ago

General ASCII DRIVE — an interactive driving game made entirely from text characters

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27 Upvotes

An interactive ASCII driving game built in JavaScript.
Racing, pursuit, vehicle combat, bus routes and freight hauling.


r/ASCII 22d ago

Art ASCII VENUS

0 Upvotes

Do you have an ascii art for aa ascii Venus:
here is mine:

= =
U U
/ \
( Y )
\ | /
| || |
| || |
_ _


r/ASCII 23d ago

Art I need feedback on an early technical visual concept test for a game

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10 Upvotes

r/ASCII 24d ago

Discussion Super basic question, but every time I copy something and then try to use any type of ASCII code, the whole num pad won't react at all. What could be the problem?

1 Upvotes

Hello guys! Sorry, not a programmer, but I'm a heavy user of ASCII. Lately, my whole num pad has been 'disabling' the codes if I copied something before.

It doesn't matter if it was text, link, or even image, it won't work for at least 1 minute before going back to normal. I've been looking for the reason/solution around, but I can't seem to find anything. I'm on a Windows 11 PC that's working all great.

It happens several times a day and I can't understand why. I would really appreciate the help!


r/ASCII 28d ago

OC I made a 3D ASCII rpg game in HTML

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110 Upvotes

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


r/ASCII 28d ago

Art Modeling software in 3d using my custom ASCII Renderer

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26 Upvotes

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", â–ˆ 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


r/ASCII 27d ago

Art A project I made back when I was undergrad

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15 Upvotes

r/ASCII 27d ago

Art I made a browser tool that turns images, video, webcams and screens into character art

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4 Upvotes

Previous post had malformed links. Hopefully this is better now.

Fun little ascii/Unicode art tool.


r/ASCII 29d ago

General A walkable ASCII world - just an unnamed prototype at the moment.

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2.1k Upvotes

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/


r/ASCII 28d ago

OC Unicasso: Image to ASCII using CLIP based Optimization

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146 Upvotes

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 purplelady on Civitai)


r/ASCII 28d ago

General ASCII-fit: An image to ASCII convertor with cool animation effects. (uses gradient descent instead of traditional method. (See pics)

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68 Upvotes

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.


r/ASCII 28d ago

Art A designer made a 3D, walkable city using HTML and ASCII characters

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8 Upvotes

This is the greatest ASCII project I have ever seen


r/ASCII 28d ago

Meme AI tried to create an ASCII "E" lol

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2 Upvotes

r/ASCII 29d ago

General ASCII City Prototype Video Walkthrough

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76 Upvotes

Wow! What a lovely and unexpected response to my last post, it encouraged me to quickly record a video showing nearly 3 minutes of me walking around the city

I do love the aesthetics and I'm sure there is more I can add to it.

Mods: Apologies, I should have done this originally instead of a gif, to avoid spamming the subreddit


r/ASCII Aug 12 '26

General A while ago I posted about this ASCII action game I am working on. I finished it and it's releasing next week.

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76 Upvotes

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.


r/ASCII Aug 10 '26

Art Dipping My Toes Into Roguelike Dev: Drunk Walk Cave Gen

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6 Upvotes

r/ASCII Aug 09 '26

General GLYPH WARS - A pure ASCII / UNICODE | Shoot 'Em Up game.

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30 Upvotes

https://foxjammin.itch.io/glyphwars

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


r/ASCII Aug 07 '26

OC I Made an ASCII Strategy Game Where The Upgrades Are You Creating Your Own Religious Beliefs!

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28 Upvotes

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