I Tried Turning Games Into Text
Why Hacker News recommends it
Pointed to as a nice overview of implementing ASCII rendering as a post-processing shader.
What it is
Acerola explores building a shader that turns games into ASCII art, walking through techniques such as brightness mapping and edge detection to see whether it looks good.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2024 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends pjob · 2025-08 · on “Rendering a game in real time with AI”
I suspect you'll have much better luck directly implementing the style you want rather than trying to get a (current gen) AI to reliably generate ANSI art. This video is a nice overview of implementing a variation of the style in a post-processing shader: [this video]
Cites cxreiff · 2024-10 · on “Show HN: Screensavers for your terminal (Bevy/Ratatui)”
Definitely something I want to do down the line... something like the Sobel filter approach that acerola uses in this video: [this video]
Cites cchance · 2025-01 · on “Yt-x: Browse YouTube from your terminal”
Cool, might want to consider going even further, and add a full ascii player to it :) [this video] (Acerolla did some crazy stuff but as a filter, but others have done it in actually consoles) [LINK]
Cites snackbroken · 2026-01 · on “ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering”
> I don’t believe I’ve ever seen shape utilized in generated ASCII art, and I think that’s because it’s not really obvious how to consider shape when building an ASCII renderer. Acerola worked a bit on this in 2024[1], using edge detection to layer correctly oriented |/-\ over the usual brightness-only pass. I think either technique has cases where one looks better than the other. [1] [this video]