ASCII art uses computer characters (like letters, numbers, punctuation, or any other symbol that can be produced via text entry) instead of pixels to produce images. Old style emoticons like :-) are an early form of ASCII art, though it predates digital computers as typewriter art and continues today in a beautiful variety of forms.

Playscii's development is ongoing and the program should now be usable for creating artwork and games. If you run into any bugs, please file a bug if you're able. Download the latest build here. New with 0.8.0, the project's documentation has detailed info on creating art and games, and is also included with Playscii itself.

With the executable builds for Windows and Mac you don't need to have anything else installed - just download, unzip, and run. If you're running from source then you'll need the dependencies listed in the readme.

The now-abandoned (as of 2024) Tumblr has art people made with Playscii, and the #playscii tag on Cohost has some as well.

Playscii's game creation capabilities are maturing as well: Endless Ladder Climbing 2 is the first released game made using Playscii, and PETSCII Fireplace is an example of a simple non-interactive "creative coding" style application.

As Playscii's sole author I gradually expand on it for my own projects. If Playscii attracts interested developers who I feel I can work well with, I'd be happy to let the project's scope broaden as seems reasonable. If you add something neat to Playscii you think would work well as a core part of it, feel free to submit a pull request on the project's Heptapod repo.

Since version 0.7.0 most major features exist in some form, so development is now a process of refinement. For a very detailed view of what's being (or might be) worked on, see the project's Trello board. Voting and commenting are enabled for anyone with a Trello account, so feel free to do so if you see something that'd be particularly useful to you!

The MIT license, which is very permissive so you can pretty much do whatever. Note that no license whatsoever applies to artwork you create with it.