A Solo Coder Built a Walkable 3D Cyberpunk City From Nothing but ASCII Letters and Numbers

A short video posted last week shows someone strolling through a dense night-time cyberpunk city. Skyscrapers rise on either side of the streets. Cars roll past. Trees stand along the sidewalks. Pedestrians move about. Everything on screen is made from ordinary keyboard characters: letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and symbols stacked and spaced to form walls, windows, roadways, and moving figures. Grow Now Games, working alone, put the whole thing together inside a single HTML file.

The code is JavaScript-based and uses the browser’s canvas element, so no game engines, 3D models, textures, or shaders are required. This city exists as a simple grid that contains the locations of its roadways, building heights, trees, automobiles, and residents. Every frame, the engine shoots a series of rays from the camera position, calculating the perspective and distance, checking for collisions, and determining which surfaces should be seen. Those results are displayed as clumps of characters on the screen. Closer items appear larger and brighter, whereas distant structures shrink and fade into darkness.

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The effect feels quite solid, since you can look all around, up, down, left, and right, and everything appears convincing. Depth is easy to interpret, and moving autos and pedestrians appear to move smoothly as you shift perspectives. Even semi-transparent trees allow light from further away to shine through their letter-based leaves. The entire thing has that greenish data-stream aspect that was common in earlier sci-fi films and games, yet it never devolves into a boring flat backdrop of text.

Grow Now Games stated that the idea was to create a location where you feel like you’re wandering around a data-driven universe rather than staring at a static image. All of this is made feasible by the proprietary ray-casting method. The map remains a plain grid of cells in memory with no frills. Every frame, the renderer does the heavy lifting, converting all those numbers into something you can see, and despite the fact that every visible surface is practically constructed from scratch as text, the performance remains smooth enough to allow you to move around in real time.

The project is still a work in progress, with more atmosphere to add, finer elements to work on, and more ways to engage with the city. Even as it is, the demo provides a comprehensive first-person experience across streets lined with tall buildings and real-life traffic. People tend to watch the video till the end since the motion keeps unveiling new corners and the character work keeps changing itself.
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