ASCII City

I grew up on ASCII Art (and ANSi Art). There's something wonderfully rudimentary about being able to draw with just the characters on your keyboard. This walkable ASCII Cyberpunk City blows that rudimentary idea out of the water and makes a fully immersive environment using Javascript and Canvas:

Every frame, the engine raycasts from the camera to work out perspective, depth, collisions, and what should be visible, then draws it all using letters, numbers, and symbols.

Watch the entire video and really let the 3Dness of it all sink in. There are semi-translucent trees that go past but if you pause on a single frame - are they really semi-translucent? Or is that just a clever trick of how the color is expressed? Maybe a bit of both.

Fascinating experience and I hope Grow Now! Games makes it into something that can be used in the browser. I'd walk around for awhile.

via Zhila.