Asciilands is completely free to play, with optional donations for those who want to help me keep the servers up. Logging in with your Discord allows for continuing progress across multiple devices as well as the social stuff like Friends, Parties, and Towns.

Any modern browser, on a computer, phone or tablet! Phones and tablets get touch controls. Planned for Steam on full release.

Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. Pick one on the title screen! Each server has its own world and characters.

Progress does save, both for guest accounts and if you are logged in with Discord. The world itself is also persistent. It is possible that there will be wipes down the line, though unless 100% necessary that would probably just be for builds and the world and not necessarily for items.

Leave your bug report in #bug-reports! Provide as much detail as possible (check the Debug menu in Settings).

Give any suggestions in #suggestions. Explain what you wanted to do and why.

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.

The first commissioned art and music are in the game! Item art by Truly / Fawkes Sakes and Lucksmyth. Music by Lab of the Ocean, JTrent and Lololy. Supporter donations paid for it.

The rest is a mix of inherited materials from Asciicker, 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. The goal is still to replace all of them with commissioned work. Ultimately this ambition is dependent on the game's success.

https://asciilands.io/credits

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.

The newer region, boss and PvP tracks are commissioned, by Lab of the Ocean, JTrent and Lololy. I'd love to replace the rest the same way!

All support for Asciilands is voluntary! It always will be, because Asciilands will never be pay to play. Donations go first towards server hosting, and then toward commissioned art and music. This will be as transparent as possible.

Support Asciilands