ASCII Game Engine

ASCII Game Engine is a code-first Unity toolkit for creating expressive ASCII games, worlds, interfaces, effects, simulations, and interactive experiences. Instead of relying on Unity's Sprite system, AGE provides its own purpose-built ASCII rendering and runtime architecture for the Universal Render Pipeline. Construct tile-based scenes directly from C# using characters, text colors, background colors, actors, sprites, maps, cameras, animation, collision, navigation, effects, UI, audio, narrative, and gameplay systems. AGE is suitable for roguelikes, dungeon crawlers, strategy games, simulations, text adventures, retro interfaces, sci-fi consoles, procedural worlds, prototypes, and any project that benefits from a flexible character-based visual style. Try the Demo: 🎮 AGE Demo Watch the ASCII Game Engine Trailer: 🎥 AGE Trailer CORE RENDERING • Custom ASCII tile rendering for URP • Character, text-color, and background-color control • Fixed-capacity tile buffers and sprite canvases • Direct tile and text manipulation • Built-in DOS 8x8 bitmap font • Custom bitmap font-atlas support • World-space and screen-space rendering • Configurable render ordering • Dirty-range tracking and automatic rendering updates • Sprite batching • Rich-text parsing and drawing • Texture-to-ASCII drawing • Drawing utilities for points, text, lines, frames, rectangles, filled rectangles, circles, ellipses, octagons, and flood filling SCENES, ACTORS, AND SPRITES • Runtime ASCII scenes • Actors and transform hierarchies • Multi-tile ASCII sprites • Configurable pivots and render order • Parent-child relationships • Actor and sprite creation through C# • Runtime positioning, rotation, scaling, activation, and visibility control • Reusable actor behaviours and sprite animation components MAPS AND CAMERAS • Tile-based ASCII maps • Height-field and heightmap-based map creation • World-space camera rendering • Camera movement and zoom • Keyboard movement, edge scrolling, middle-mouse panning, and pointer-anchored zoom • Camera attachment to scene actors • Viewport navigation and cursor conversion utilities • Coordinate conversion between screen, world, map, and tile spaces ANIMATION AND MOVEMENT • Tile animation clips and players • Character, color, and tile-transform animation • Sprite animators • Transform animation clips, players, and actor animators • Step and interpolated playback modes • Runtime play, pause, restart, and stop control • Reusable animation data • Two-dimensional inverse-kinematics chains with joint limits • Configurable flocking agents and flock simulation COLLISION AND SPATIAL SYSTEMS • Tile-mask collision • Scene-owned collision worlds • Actor-attached tile colliders • Collision layers, masks, triggers, and enabled states • Uniform-grid broad-phase acceleration • Overlap queries and first-overlap queries • Swept collision and earliest-contact reporting • Dynamic collider support • Optional static collision grids • Static collision data generated from selected map terrain types PATHFINDING AND NAVIGATION • A* pathfinding • Map-backed navigation grid • Caller-defined terrain types • Terrain masks and traversal restrictions • Navigation penalties • Variable rectangular agent footprints • Registered navigation obstacles • Reservation-aware multi-agent occupancy • Dynamic waiting, yielding, retrying, and replanning behavior • Navigation agents with MoveTo, Stop, Pause, and Resume commands • Speed-based and time-step movement modes • RTS formation-planning helpers for multi-unit destinations VISIBILITY AND FOG OF WAR • Persistent explored and currently visible map states • Circular and blocker-aware line-of-sight vision modes • Dynamic reveal and concealment • Configurable vision sources and radii • Runtime line-of-sight blocker updates • Fog-controlled actor visibility targets • Incremental fog rendering PROCEDURAL GENERATION • Value, simplex, and diamond-square noise • Seed-driven height fields • Heightmap texture conversion • Height-ra