Slashdot Mirror
ASCII Portal In the Works
Rock, Paper, Shotgun points out a video showing Portal, redone with ASCII graphics. It's still in development, but appears to be quite far along. Its creator, Cymon, says on his website, "I have Windows XP, so all binaries will by default be for Windows. But I will also be including the source code with the distribution and am doing my best to write it cross-platform compatible, so it should compile in Linux and Mac. I've had successful builds done in Linux." He also talks in detail about his design plans and ideas.
There are some modern games still being produced in ASCII, like Dwarf Fortress.
What people tend to forget is that using ASCII as game graphics, you can do a lot more in-depth gaming without having your game look like crap.
It's kinda like the difference between a book and a movie. Books tend to draw you in more because you get to use your imagination to fill in the scenery. This gives the power to a mediocre book to still be quite good. However, the current state of special effects in movies and CG means that if your movie uses technology from even a few years back, the movie looks like crap and will probably not be received well. And as with movies, the latest technology requires a lot of money and man-power.
And of course, ASCII gives you a lot more CPU power for AI and other neat things. And it doesn't have to exclude the use of the mouse, sound effects, music, mulitplayer and other niceties that we get in full 3D games.
Check out Left 4k Dead -> Left 4 Dead in 4kb! It's pretty fun and the sourcecode's available too.
http://www.object404.com
Uh... what's so innovative about swiping someone else's gameplay and name?
Oh, it's in 2D? It might be cross platform? Yeah, been done.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Cool.
Until this project is finished, may I recommend Portal: The Flash Game ?