ASCIILANDS
Credits and licenses
Asciilands is developed by Qaz. It is a new, independently developed multiplayer browser game with its own world, gameplay, and direction.
Our rendering roots
Our rendering technology is derived from Asciicker, created by gumix / msokalski. Huge thank you for making this extraordinary ASCII renderer available under the MIT license!
Asciilands contains many changes to the original engine and project materials. It is not an official Asciicker release and is not affiliated with or endorsed by its authors.
Art, fonts and software
- Nature models: Quaternius, Ultimate Nature Pack (CC0).
- Footsteps (including water): original Asciicker audio, used under its MIT license. Shoreline waves: Gentle lake recording by TRP, CC0. Asciilands chest effects, wind and birds: original procedural synthesis.
- Inherited Asciicker artwork and glyph fonts: gumix / msokalski. Asciilands also includes custom generated character, equipment and world artwork.
- Roboto Medium: Google (Apache 2.0). Cinzel, Press Start 2P, VT323 and IBM Plex Mono: their respective authors (SIL Open Font License).
- React, React DOM, Scheduler and Lucide / Feather icons.
- stb_vorbis, uPNG / LodePNG, tinfl, and the Emscripten runtime and supporting libraries.
AI assistance
There are many opposing views on AI in today's world, all the more so in the game dev community. I've done my best to take a thoughtful and practical approach to AI use in Asciilands' development.
First, to be plain: AI was used copiously to write the code of Asciilands. The truth is that when it comes to coding, Asciilands couldn't exist without AI assistance. AI-written code will soon be in essentially all software, as the efficiency it gives to development is insane. While I enjoy doing a few Leetcode problems every now and then, I've never been an amazing coder, and even if I was, it would've taken many more years to create Asciilands without AI help.
Other assets, like artwork and music, are a different story. More on that below.
All user-facing text in Asciilands is human-written, or at least it should be - if you find placeholder AI-written text please let me know immediately in #bug-reports so I can replace it myself.
Artwork and other assets
Asciilands contains a mixture of inherited materials from Asciicker (more on that below), appropriately licensed 3rd-party resources (i.e. free resources made available online), my own manual work, and AI-generated resources.
All AI-generated assets are meant as placeholders. Unfortunately I lack the talent to make the number of assets required at any quality, and I lack the money to hire the talented people who could do it for me.
I want to replace all assets, eventually, with professionally commissioned artwork. Initial donation funding goals will be for server-hosting, but if we reach that, the next goal will be to save for these commissions. Ultimately this ambition is dependent on the game's success.
Music
The main theme of Asciilands comes from a warm-up piece I used to play on the piano growing up. I honestly do not know where it originally comes from - if someone can let me know, please do! (I really hope it's not copyrighted).
I spent some time playing around with the piece and coming up with a few pretty rudimentary melodies. Unfortunately, my musical talent is both not very great and entirely limited to piano, so I used further AI assistance to add more instruments and build the compositions. This is yet another area I would love to hire a professional to overhaul and improve, and I will should Asciilands receive enough funding through donations!
Donations
All support for Asciilands is voluntary. Donations will first go towards server hosting, and then toward replacing AI-assets with human-made assets. This will be as transparent as possible.