Explore This 3D World Rendered In ASCII Art

Pixelated RPGs are pretty standard in games like Legend of Zelda and Pokemon, but have you ever seen anything like ASCIICKER? It’s a full-color three-dimensional world rendered with ASCII art and playable in your browser.

For the time being, the game exists as an experiment. There’s no storyline or goals other than exploring the world, although you can meet up with (or follow) others exploring the game — although all of the sprites look the same, so it may be difficult to have interactions. The game was created by [Gumix] and built entirely in JavaScript without using any other game engines.

All of the previous iterations have also been published online and are accessible by adding X1 up to X13 to the end of the URL. With game development beginning in 2017, it has since been through a considerable amount of change. There’s an entire subreddit dedicated to the game with regular updates from the creator on the development of an open-source dev tool for building new levels and features for the environment. The current engine is capable of rendering objects as thin as fences as well as reflections in bodies of water.

You can try out the game for yourself and see what you think!

19 thoughts on “Explore This 3D World Rendered In ASCII Art

    1. He made 3D render in C/C++ and text mini renderer in js. This is what he, Gumix, said in discord server of asciicker: “in browsers both asciicker and asciipatrol use custom WebGL mini-renderer written in pure JS it is just capable of plopping colored ascii. All 3d and 2d happens right in the game code written in C++ compiled to wasm (asciicker) or asm.js (ascii-patrol).”

  1. Interesting but isn’t the real cleverness of ascii art the careful substitution of characters according to their print densities? Here it seems to be a small subset of characters and the bulk of the shading is done by colour fill. It could drop the ascii character and work well enough just with colour pixels.
    It would be interesting to see just how effective the ascii shading would become if it had a black and white mode.

  2. Why?

    Ok, I understand we aren’t supposed to ask that and I do mostly agree.

    But, it’s ASCII art that requires a graphical browser. Why not make it work in ssh (or even telnet, what’s to secure?). At the very least maybe Links.

    It’s like a DOS program that only runs in Windows!

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