Ascii Cyberpunk Visual Novel

[dorne]

Here's an idea that I'm entertaining. Just a bit of cyberpunk fiction using an ascii terminal. It would feature ascii image animations, audio, and an animated ascii interface controllable by keyboard.

One possibility may be to include an SDL2 window to create animations that resemble the real world, while controls are locked to the ascii terminal. Things happening in the 'ascii' world would transfer over to the animated 'real' world. This may be too advanced for me because this may require learning how to either run both an ascii gui and SDL2 window in the same program, or how to spawn a process and communicating data between both interfaces to create a cohesive narrative. I may just stick to the 'ascii' aspect.

I have been procrastinating by learning (relearning, learning more about?) how to code in C. I've always held interest in using a text-based user interface. The library ncurses allows an interface of cursor management inside a terminal.

It just so happens that ncurses has been ported to Windows for the MinGW compiler here:

http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/

After a day and a half I got ncurses and SDL2 to work with the compiler. I've also been able to print a terminal sized (80x24 characters) ascii screen. I use ffmpeg to convert gifs/videos into image sequences, and then ascgen2 to convert those sequences into ascii.

My thoughts on how to compile the sequences into a C program would be to convert the text files into a string and either putting them in an array constant or #DEFINE them, in a header file, and calling them as needed.

[Sonomi]

I'm not sure if you wanted feedback or anything...but I like your idea! Cyberpunk is one of my favorite genres and I have a weak spot for anything retro. I remember doing something very similar, except I used C++ with the cmd window.

If you're not already aware, Gimp is capable of exporting bitmap images as C-friendly character arrays (.xpm format). I would put these in a header file, too.

All in all, best of wishes with your project!