Create complete ASCII games in Unity with rendering, actors, maps, animation, collision, pathfinding, effects, UI, procedural generation, and 32 documented tutorials.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 DemoWatch the ASCII Game Engine Trailer:🎥 AGE TrailerCORE 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 fillingSCENES, 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 componentsMAPS 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 spacesANIMATION 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 simulationCOLLISION 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 typesPATHFINDING 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 destinationsVISIBILITY 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 renderingPROCEDURAL GENERATION• Value, simplex, and diamond-square noise• Seed-driven height fields• Heightmap texture conversion• Height-range map materialization• Custom tile appearance, terrain type, and navigation penalty per height range• Cellular-automata dungeon generation• Tunneling dungeon generation• Room-graph and corridor-digger layouts• Dungeon rooms, corridors, connections, entrances, and exits• Dungeon-to-map materialization• Rule-based dungeon population and placement• Generated maps usable by collision, navigation, and fog-of-war systems• Tutorial terrain examples including water, sand, grass, and mountainsEFFECTS AND PARTICLES• Fixed-capacity ASCII particle systems• Reusable effect settings and runtime effect updates• Particle explosions with sparks, debris, and smoke• Fireworks• Flame jets• Fountains• Nuclear explosions• Ring pulses• Smoke emitters• Spark emitters• Splatter effects• Weather emitters• Confetti bursts• Grid explosions• Grid fire• Electric arcs• Plasma effects• ASCII code rain• Tutorial examples including projectile trails, impact effects, recoil, muzzle flashes, and large integrated combat effectsGAMEPLAY SYSTEMS• Health, damage requests, restoration, reset, and health bars• Fixed reusable projectile pools• Swept projectile collision and impact callbacks• Homing-projectile pools with target acquisition and steering• Target registration, collider aliases, faction masks, category masks, priorities, and radius queries• Damage routing through registered targets• Production queues• Command parsing, command registration, invocation, and results• Branching narrative stories with nodes, choices, conditions, effects, session state, and persistent story variables• RTS helpers for command markers, formation planning, procedural map generation, placement ghosts, and selection rectangles• Reusable grid-based gameplay effects and runtime object managementAUDIO• Runtime sound playback• Configurable sound settings and sound handles• Music tracks and playlists• Play, pause, stop, repeat, and track-navigation control• Included sound effects and music used by selected tutorialsASCII USER INTERFACE• ASCII UI roots, elements, controls, and reusable styles• Panels, borders, labels, icons, and buttons• Checkboxes, toggle buttons, option buttons, and option groups• Sliders and progress bars• List views• Graphs• Radar displays and contacts• Keyboard navigation support• Screen-space menus and information displays• Sci-fi console interface example• Music-player interface example• Text-adventure presentation• Dialogue choices and branching interactions32 PLAYABLE AND DOCUMENTED TUTORIALSAGE includes 32 independently runnable tutorial folders covering the engine from fundamental tile rendering to larger integrated systems.The tutorials demonstrate topics including:• Direct tile-buffer rendering• Scenes, actors, and sprites• Actor transform hierarchies• Rich text and story presentation• Shape drawing• Tile and transform animation• Camera navigation• Maps and height fields• Noise generation• A* pathfinding• Navigation agents• Collision• Effects and particles• ASCII user interfaces• Procedural dungeon generation• Texture drawing• Actor behaviours• Health and damage• Audio• Projectiles and targeting• Flocking• Inverse kinematics• Boss presentation• Nuclear-strike effects• Missile defense• Fog of war• Flame perimeter• Fireteam combat• Sci-fi consoles• Music-player interfaces• Branching text adventuresEach tutorial contains its complete runtime implementation in one C# file. The source is extensively commented so that it reads as both working code and practical documentation.Important API calls explain their purpose, argument meanings, coordinate spaces, ownership rules, runtime behavior, and cleanup responsibilities. The tutorials are designed to help developers understand the systems rather than merely observe finished visual demonstrations.FULL SOURCE CODEASCII Game Engine includes the complete C# runtime source and is designed to be extended through normal C# code.SUPPORTFor questions, bug reports, or assistance, contact:octamodius@yahoo.comAI tools were used to assist with the creation and refinement of portions of the C# source code, code documentation, tutorial content, and included sound effects.The generated code was reviewed, edited, integrated, and tested as part of the normal development process. The sound effects were procedurally synthesized specifically for this package and do not use third-party audio recordings or sample libraries.All final design decisions, feature direction, testing, packaging, and release preparation were performed by the publisher.
