2020-11-10

The process of putting together this gemini site got me thinking about ways to make cooler ASCII art, and specifically thinking about a Playscii feature I theorized years ago under the name "brushes": a sort of intelligent paint tool that lets user-defined code drive different character and color painting over the course of a single stroke. For example, using a particular character set's semigraphics to draw lines that, over multiple tiles, curve and bend in right angles, criss-cross one another, etc, like so:

  ┌───────────
──┼─────┐
  │   ──┤
  ├───┬─┘
  │   │  
  └      

A hard-coded version of this logic would be character-set-specific and have significantly less value to artists, so the present challenge is to think out a way to let some mix of code & data define brushes in a general powerful flexible way, and how I would need to refactor the current painting code to support that.

It's definitely doable, I just need to think it through, and my code architecture brain is a bit rusty. In general, my productivity since quarantine has been pretty focused on fixes and small improvements to existing projects. Being creative and tackling bigger challenges has been hard. I'm looking for confidence boosts.