I Tried Turning Games Into Text

Acerola · 572.2K views · 2024-06-30 · 18:18

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

Pointed to as a nice overview of implementing ASCII rendering as a post-processing shader.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2024–2026

Topics

Computer graphics & rendering Creative coding & generative art

What people said

pjob · 2025-08 · Recommendation
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: [VIDEO]
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snackbroken · 2026-01 · Reference
> 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] [VIDEO]
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cchance · 2025-01 · Reference
Cool, might want to consider going even further, and add a full ascii player to it :) [VIDEO] (Acerolla did some crazy stuff but as a filter, but others have done it in actually consoles) [LINK]
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Sources

Video by Acerola, played through YouTube.

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