No one remembers that this forum was created for game development (Thats why there are two games in the top left!!)

I mean, I do, the original battle plan was to spread around the "creating virtual worlds" thingy right? I just thought that generally there was no discussion at all on gamedev here and it's been an alt web forum for the longest time now.

This is so interesting! Thank you for sharing,

Just found this website:

Are you sure you want to promote that? It has an overtly neo-nazi ANSI pack as a featured creation on its main page, swastika and all.

How do i make ASCII art? It seems very interesting and i would like to put it on my site. I’ve never made it before but it looks easy enough.

For simple one or two liners it's not really different from just typing a smiley.

Like this, a rose: --',-'-@

For larger ones, make sure you have a monospace editor (e.g. all symbols are the same width) and get comfortable with the Insert key.

Video games! Zoop!

Do you develop them? Do you plan on developing them? Have you already developed them?

If so, let's see them!

I think video game development fits in super nicely with the web DIY subculture, especially when it's about smaller indie projects that can be completed by a single person in a reasonable time-frame without it becoming their job. There's engines out there these days that let you develop super small games for under-powered hardware like the Playdate. Or GBStudio, which lets you develop for the original GameBoy. Or plenty of other ways to make a worthwhile single-developer game!

I think that's just because I'm an emotional and argumentative person. I'm also very talkative IRL. The kind of talkative that waves their hands around and speaks so fast half the audience can understand a thing. And then if I'm passionate about something I can also start yelling without noticing it. Some people perceive that as an attack, so I'm glad posts can't be heard.

In writing, that all translates into walls of text. I'm not exactly thinking what to say, it's like /home/user/ put it, a stream of consciousness. And that consciousness sometimes goes faster than I type and then adds thing on top of that, so I'm addind and adding and adding and suddenly whoops, that's a huge damn post.

Oh, this is all very relatable.

Do you also have that thing where your thoughts are faster than your hands so you stop writing in the middle of a sentence, start a new sentence, and then move back to finish the first sentence later?
Or worse, doing that non-stop and recursively, so that if you stopped me in the middle of writing an e-mail, it would kind of look like a bunch of aborted sentences because I haven't "filled them all in" yet?

I actually used to be a radio host for a local radio station when I was younger. It was kind of a free-for-all-citizens kind of thing but only a handful of people used it, so it was still kind of a deal.

The only reasons why I don't have a podcast now are (1) that I don't like my voice anymore these days and (2) that radio allowed me to play copyrighted music, while uploading podcasts online doesn't.

In general though I can recommend it. I'd listen to yours!

oh thanks for letting me know! maybe i can find more if i use ANSI and Unicode in my search terms

There used to be a really edgy subculture around creating ANSI art by hand that was really similar to the early hacker, cracker and demoscene. It was simply called ANSI scene and it'd mostly consists of groups of artists who got together and regularly released downloadable packages of ANSI art for people to admire. It is kinda like the game piracy subculture these days, so a lot of pseudonyms, beefs between rivaling groups, and constant contests for the best.

So, this is ANSI art.


ANSI is usually immediately recognizable because it almost looks like pixelart; since the ANSI specification has full-width blocks in many variations.
ASCII on the other hand uses "normal" Latin symbols only with a bit of punctuation thrown in.

This is ASCII art:


And Unicode has a fuckton of symbols, including emoji, plenty of the world's writing systems and many many useful symbols. It's the encoding we are all probably going to use while browsing right now. It's the up to date standard for encoding writing these days. There isn't a Unicode art subculture though as far as I know.

I've heard about it before, and those screenshots make it look incredibly appealing to play (especially the one with Link). Do you have any levels or episodes to recommend?

Sadly I have been "out of the loop" for quite a while, but the forums are a good place to start. They hold contests regularly; playing the contest winners would probably be your best bet.

Is there any place to download the game anymore?

There's three different large versions now: SMBX2, SMBX38A, and TheXTech. SMBX2 has the most features by far and is the most popular one these days, too. SMBX38A has less features overall, but it does have more NPCs to choose from. TheXTech is a re-implementation of the original game but it's free and open source software plus has multi-platform (e.g. GNU+Linux version) support.

Which one you choose is mostly up to you, although most current episodes will require SMBX2.

I honestly just put down a stream of consciousness, kind of as if I was talking to someone in real life verbally.

Things I want to say just come into my mind as I type, and then I literally talk to myself as I am typing as if I was having an actual verbal conversation on this thread to get the phrasing right in real time. Typing takes just a bit longer than talking for me, because I am doing the same thing, just with my hands instead of my mouth.

I feel like short form social media has kind of destroyed our ability to express ourselves socially with words. It's all short, poignant opinions and one liners nowadays.

My only advice is: try to write with the same mental muscles that you're also holding a conversation with in real life.

Honestly I love Final Fantasy XIV. It becomes the best story I've ever seen in a video game in the expansions, the community is super friendly especially for an MMORPG, and its world and character design is beautiful. It has so much content I can barely count it all up, and I already have 600 hours in it and still am a newbie.

Because I am on good terms with my parents and friends, they know about it all.

I know it's a pet peeve but that's actually not ASCII at all that you posted. It's ANSI, or Unicode, depending on the encoding you use.

Right ok, gotcha. So basically my options are twitch or owncast, and I don't currently have a server to host things on so I'll just stick to twitch probably

Or you could join someone's existing PeerTube or Owncast instance. I also don't host my own, I use spectra.video.

Here are a few screenshots I yanked from the screenshot thread