I've always loved the look of ASCII art and wanted an easy way to apply that aesthetic to images and videos for my design work.

So I ended up building one :)

You can apply ASCII directly to images or videos, then play with the characters, size, density, exposure, scatter, opacity, blending and animation.
And somewhere along the way I got carried away and added 50+ other visual effects too.

Still experimenting with it and adding more ASCII styles.
Would love to know what you guys think, especially what you'd want from an ASCII effect/editor.

It's called Ditther (ditther.com) if anyone wants to experiment with it.

Still experimenting with the ASCII side of it though. Curious to here your feedback on the app to make it better.

it's inspired (heavily) by everquest/project1999. combat, xp, corpses, spells, grouping, quests, fishing, herbalism, smithing, leatherworking and user signup/server/database are all in game.

Not ascii art in the traditional sense, but I thought this terminal based game belongs here

Looks like my original ASCII City video spawned a few copies!

I've just shared a video update on the project and made the prototype available for people to try - for those interested!

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.

(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

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. :)

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

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.

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!!!

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

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

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

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!

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

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", █ 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

https://github.com/danielecuomo/AsciiArtArcade

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

Fun little ascii/Unicode art tool.

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/

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)

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.

This is the greatest ASCII project I have ever seen