About

What ASCII City is and who makes it

ASCII City is a 3D night city rendered entirely as characters. There are no 3D models and no shaders: the city is a 512 × 512 grid that records where the roads, parks and buildings are and how tall everything is. Every frame, a small raycasting renderer works out what you can see from where you stand and draws it as coloured monospace glyphs.

You walk the streets in first person, cross traffic and rain, enter buildings, ride lifts to the roofs and watch the night line run over the avenues. Neighbourhoods generate as you reach them, so the city grows while you explore. It is an exploration prototype: no missions, no score, nothing to install.

How it is built

The whole game is one self-contained HTML file. The world is generated from a seed at runtime and held in compact typed arrays, the renderer casts one ray per glyph column, and a glyph atlas composes the frame into a single canvas image. Settings such as the number of people, the rain, the time of day and the colour palette are yours to change while you play.

Who makes it

ASCII City is made by Thorsten Meyer in Iffeldorf, Germany, and is powered by Thorsten Meyer AI. It draws on a long tradition of ASCII art and on recent browser experiments that turn cities into characters.

Enter the city