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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

That's not really ASCII art. I mean it is, but iirc it's custom shader code in Unity made to look like retro style ASCII art. So it's actually way more difficult to make than a grid of ASCII characters.

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Although I get where you’re coming from, I disagree with the assertion that this makes it “not really ASCII art”. At the end of the day modern terminal emulators use a graphics API at one point to render characters on the screen. You wouldn’t say that iTerm2 isn’t a “real tty” because it has a metal backend (in this case, iTerm2 is also using a custom shader to render ASCII/unicode — more complex than this game of course). Where do we even draw the line? Is ASCII art only legit if it can render natively in a traditional terminal? How about only one without hardware acceleration? POSIX compliant? Further down the rabbit hole we could draw a line in the sand at tty’s with no window manager.

It would still be trivial for the developer to add an “textshot” feature to export a frame to .txt, so I’d still qualify it as fitting the ASCII art aesthetic.

isn’t a “real tty” because it has a metal backend

I was at first confused. Of course "real ttys" have some metal in their back end! (I'm too young and my default mental image of a "real tty" contains a CRT, but there's probably even more metal in a teletype.)

> it's actually way more difficult to make than a grid of ASCII characters

Any pointers on how to set up a grid of ASCII characters? That'd be what I would use tcod for. It seems like it should be easy, but I guess I don't know how to look for it.

Depends if its easier for you to do 3D. I remember when I found thr ThreeJS ascii shader I had a bit of fun with it...

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