I Tried Turning Games Into Text
Acerola1 HN recommender · recommended in 1 month, 2024-2026
571K views · 2 years ago · tutorial · evergreen
Acerola explores building a shader that turns games into ASCII art, walking through techniques such as brightness mapping and edge detection to see whether it looks good.
Pointed to as a nice overview of implementing ASCII rendering as a post-processing shader.
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4 comments from Hacker News
> I don’t believe I’ve ever seen shape utilized in generated ASCII art, and I think that’s because it’s not really obvious how to consider shape when building an ASCII renderer. Acerola worked a bit on this in 2024[1], using edge detection to layer correctly oriented |/-\ over the usual brightness-only pass. I think either technique has cases where one looks better than the other. [1] ▶ this video
I suspect you'll have much better luck directly implementing the style you want rather than trying to get a (current gen) AI to reliably generate ANSI art. This video is a nice overview of implementing a variation of the style in a post-processing shader: ▶ this video
Cool, might want to consider going even further, and add a full ascii player to it :) ▶ this video (Acerolla did some crazy stuff but as a filter, but others have done it in actually consoles) link
Definitely something I want to do down the line... something like the Sobel filter approach that acerola uses in this video: ▶ this video