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 is usable for creating artwork and games, though you should expect some bugs as it's not ready for a stable release yet. If you run into any, 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.

Now that Playscii is up and running as an art tool you can follow @Playscii on twitter or the Playscii Tumblr blog for art and development updates. You might also search for @playscii on twitter to see work other people have made.

Playscii's game creation capabilities are maturing as well: Endless Ladder Climbing 2 is the first released game made using Playscii.

I'm Playscii's sole author and I'm building it to be a tool and tech base for a series of games, the largest being an unannounced commercial game that may very well not be open source. For the foreseeable future, my dev priorities on Playscii will be focused on supporting that. 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.

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 even this liberal license does not apply to artwork created with Playscii, so please use it however you like!