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ASCII CITY: a cyberpunk city explored in pseudo-3D plaintext [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2026-08-31  

ASCII CITY is an explorable cyberpunk city rendered in three dimensions with plain text characters. You can run the streets, enter buildings and take lifts to see it all from different elevations. There's no audio, story or "game" in there yet, but buying it buys access to future version and continued development. It's just £2.50 (about $3.40.)

I wanted to build a city that feels alive, but is made entirely from ASCII characters. This is a small custom engine built with JavaScript and Canvas — no Unity, Unreal, 3D models, textures, or shaders. The world is a grid-based city with roads, buildings, trees, cars, and pedestrians. Every frame, the engine raycasts from the camera to work out perspective, depth, collisions, and what should be visible, then draws it all using letters, numbers, and symbols. In other words: it's a tiny 3D city made from blocks, viewed through a screen of ASCII characters.

There's nothing to install, either: the whole thing is a single HTML file, and will run from anywhere you save it (this is becoming a trend)

Rendering 3D worlds as plaintext has been done before, but here the effect is enhanced by the author's careful control of perspective and color. For example, buildings remain vertical, without foreshortening, so the sides and window patterns remain linear and therefore represented by the same characters. Though not rendering 3D models, the effect reminds me of how Lucas Pope made the 1-bit pixelated world of Obra Dinn work in three dimensions—and he doesn't have to worry about shimmering or glitching as that suits the cyberpunk theme.

Previously:

• Ascii World: minimalist pseudo-3D game in ASCII characters

• Random ASCII spaceship generator

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