I Tried Turning Games Into Text

ASCII art has been a staple of the internet since its inception -- but today I'm wondering if we could make a shader that turns games into ASCII art, and if we can, would it even look good?

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Music:
Afternoon Break - Persona 3 OST
In A Moment's Time - Skullgirls OST
Junes Theme - Persona 4 OST
During The Test - Persona 3 OST
Midori Eyes - Paradise Killer OST
Police Station - Persona OST
With Renewed Hope, We Continue Forward - VA-11 Hall-A OST
Neon District - VA-11 Hall-A OST
Sandgem Town - Pokemon Diamond OST
Like A Dream Come True - Persona 4 OST
Color Your Night - Persona 3 OST

Thanks for watching!

This video is dedicated to my friend, Alotryx.

#acerola #gamedev #unity3d #graphics #shaders

[Acerola_t]

I got braces on so I'm learning how to speak again, sorry for any poorly enunciated words!

[roifrvr]

"Is it possible to edge" Is a far more philosophical question than I expected from this video

[saythrtL]

0:48 There is a pretty good came called "Stone Story RPG" that uses ascii art for the entire game, and by the entire game, i mean the ENTIRE GAME, menus, lightning, everything, and it looks beautifully simple

[LemonHeadYT]

"Today, we'll be turning characters, into characters" 🔥✍

[OnonQueen]

IDK why but the shader rendering actual text characters in the boss fight cutscene as just lines and squares was really funny. You literally Are Text, ASCII shader...

[pinkorcyanbutlong]

Finally someone that takes into account edge flow, as someone that does some 'by hand' ascii art, always am a bit annoyed when all of those 'ascii art generators' just do the "bright = big character, dark = small character" and leave at that

A way of making it even nicer would probably to have an extra pass that applies some character heuristics, like "if above is '\' and bellow is '/', this should be a ')' ", and also take into account that letter characters also have slopes, so if you have a 'top left to bottom right' sloped edge, the 'q' character also fits it, and a 'V' is where '\' and '/' converge going down, and so on

[DarkSwordsman]

3:29 I also recommend uploading in 1440p (you can transcode or export, you don't need your timeline to be 1440p) because then YouTube does the "Enhanced Bitrate" thing where normal 1080p gets half the bitrate it used to.

[ZaneBastian]

Also, thank you for not doing the increasingly dull LLM / Transformers / AI content. You'll soon be what current gen game devs & technical artists (who are starting now) will call an "OG" resource on graphics programming.

On your path, and with a few good collabs, you have the potential to co-author the next evolution of the GPU Gems series.
Excited for you to blow up :D

[mattcay]

16:45 Very ironic how an ASCII shader can't draw text worth crap 🤖

Not throwing shade, just found it funny. I love the effect, it looks great!

[Johnny]

Talks about ASCII art:
Creates ASCII art:
Beats Elden Ring with ASCII art:
Gives the public ASCII art for FREE:
Doesn't elaborate further....:

BaZED

[an_asp]

A lot of ascii art uses a variety of other symbols for edges, like V, <, > for sharp points, Y for branching lines, and sometimes non-ascii characters (japanese characters seem common) to get more complicated edges. The art at 6:45 has a lot of examples of this. I wonder how you'd be able to automate something like that; you'd need a lot more than just the angle of the edge. It seems like you'd need to do something complicated with the "subpixels" as you downscale the image to find the specific shape of the edges, and map it to the most similar-looking edge character.

[TheLeftGamer]

I love the suspense leading up to the Mohg fight only for him to Comet Azur his ass

[goofmuffin]

there's Asciicker, which is 3d and rendered in ascii characters

[tekurohamada]

Putting a video of your cat with the sponsor part is honestly so smart, I respect that

[TacoGuy]

stone story rpg is an amazing game which uses ascii art for the visuals

[theftking]

I remember those dope ASCII GameFaqs guide logos. They were sick.

[GerardMenvussa]

13:15 With fading based on depth, that's my favourite option. Looks amazing.

[brandonscott]

Underrated channel. Pacing, explanations, visual guides and comedy/presentation are all done well.

Thanks Acerola 👏

[MoleNihil]

1:57 We are all edging, aren't we

[jero]

big game studio does a general 'replace bright with big character, dark with small character' and called it a day, but then you come in and did just that much more work and on all accounts blew them out of the water all by yourself. you deserve my sub o7