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.

Comments

Innovative

[sopssa]

I must admit that my first thought was why and that its gonna lost all the interest in ascii mode where it would just teleport from one place to other. However after seeing the video, it seems to be a lot more than that and has very neat portal like effects. I loved how it creates the landscape on the "empty" space instead of just teleporting, which makes it seem continuous.

In an indirect way this also showed me that current games aren't just about graphics and innovative gameplay would had been forgotten. Portal could had been done years ago the same way its done here. However it was new kind of game and had good and fitting graphics, so the usual thought that new games aren't innovative doesn't really cut.

I hope this gets converted to linux aswell so I can play it over ssh :)

Re:Innovative

[RenHoek]

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.

Re:Innovative

[X0563511]

"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."

The problem is that some people consider ASCII graphics to look like crap, just by their virtue of being ASCII.

That said, it gives you the power to work on the gameplay etc, and you can later on put actual graphical tiles in, if you wanted. So long as you make the logic "portable" enough, you could even go so far as to put the game into a 3D graphics engine, and it would play the same, but (obviously) be presented in 3D.

Re:Innovative

[cgomezr]

The thing is that, as opposed to graphics, text characters are symbols that have been explicitly designed (and evolved) to be easily distinguishable.

There are several roguelikes that give you the option of using ASCII or tiles (Nethack, Dwarf Fortress if you count that as a roguelike, Crawl, etc.) but tiles are mostly a choice for newbies who are scared of ASCII. An experienced player will always choose ASCII because it will give him a broader view of the situation. With ASCII, it is easy to have an 80x50 dungeon in full view, with every object perfectly distinguishable. To do that with tiles in most current screens, you would need 16x16 tiles and those tiles are just too small to look decent and distinguishable (see this one, for example) while an ASCII char is perfectly distinguishable at even smaller sizes than that.

So roguelikes using tiles typically just let you see a smaller part of the dungeon, which is a disadvantage, and thus any experienced player who wants to play in the best way possible will choose ASCII.

So no, it's not just a matter of being easier to code or saving CPU time. For some kinds of games, ASCII is just better.

Not ASCII

[Archaemic]

I hate to be the pedantic one to point this out, but this isn't ASCII. It might even be pushing it to call it ANSI, but it's certainly a closer classification. Looks more like CP 437 than anything else.

...anyone else remember ZZT? I do.

Re:Not ASCII

[LSD-OBS]

You ASCII stupid question, you get a stupid ANSI.

I don't care how nerdy it is

[Rooked_One]

That is one of those coolest things i've seen in a while. I used to love programming stuff with basic graphics on the apple 2's, so this really takes me back. I'm not sure if the apple II's would have the horsepower to pull of the "spins" though ;)

Speaking of Valve Source games conversions...

[naz404]

Check out Left 4k Dead -> Left 4 Dead in 4kb! It's pretty fun and the sourcecode's available too.

You can do this with any SDL game

[m50d]

Just set your SDL_VIDEODRIVER to aalib (or better, caca, for colour). Ascii frozen bubble can be quite fun.

Another non-3D version of Portal

[Twinky]

Cool.

Until this project is finished, may I recommend Portal: The Flash Game ?