Gizmo Knight

A real-time multiplayer ASCII fantasy brawler that runs in the browser. The whole world is rendered as colored text glyphs with WebGL, lit by torches, campfires, runes and spells.

Play

npm install
npm run dev      # http://localhost:5173
npm run build    # static site in dist/ (Vercel builds this automatically via vercel.json)

Pick a name (no account), a class and a mode. Everyone online shares one realm and follows the host's mode and map:

• Free for All: every knight for themself, first to 15 kills.
• Boss Raid: co-op against Gorrath, the Hollow King. He has telegraphed slams, fire breath, imp summons and an enraged meteor rain, and waves of imps join in.

Maps rotate every round: Moonlit Vale, Ashen Wastes (rivers of lava, basalt spires, embers) and Frostmere (slippery frozen lake, snowy pines, ice crystals). Water can be waded at reduced speed, and a dash carries you across a narrow stretch. Lava is a wall to everyone but the Angel.

Classes (each has its own three spells on F / G / R, its own dash, and a signature):

Class	Spells	Dash	Signature
⚔ Knight	Crescent Wave, Judgment, Summon Blades (hold for a barrage)	Shield Charge: bowls enemies over	Wide sweeps, and every swing throws a sword wave; blocking refunds mana
⚒ Berserker	Fireball, Inferno Leap, Eruption	Inferno Rush: leaves burning ground	Bloodlust: under 40% HP he hits harder and heals on hit
✦ Sorcerer	Arcane Missiles, Chain Lightning, Meteor	Phase Shift: chainable teleports (22 MP each) leaving purple ooze	Deepest mana, strongest spells
☾ Shadow	Shadow Daggers, Shadowstrike, Smoke Bomb	Shadow Step: invisible while dashing	Backstab: hits from behind or out of smoke always crit
☠ Necromancer	Soul Bolt (drains life), Raise Dead (costs blood + mana), Corpse Nova	Grave Swap: trade places with a minion	His minions are little purple copies of him
✟ Angel	Holy Lance, Radiance (heal + ward), Starfall	Radiant Glide: a long glide	Flies over water and lava, immune to burning ground

Tap the dash for a dodge; hold it to keep sprinting while mana drains. Max HP never grows during a match; kills add damage and mana. Mana also comes back faster while moving, from melee hits and in a waystone's light.

Sound: every effect and the ambience (wind, insects, water, campfire crackle) is synthesized live with Web Audio, no audio files. M or the ♪ button mutes.

Desktop: WASD / arrows or hold left mouse to move, Shift to run, Space or a quick left-click to slash (hold Space for a ground slam), F / G / R (or right-click for F) for your class's three spells (hold any spell key to charge it with all your MP), hold Q to shield, C or Ctrl to dash (hold to sprint), E to travel at a waystone, Tab for the scoreboard, M to mute, mouse wheel or - / = to zoom. Phone: drag to move; / slash (hold to slam), the three spell buttons (hold any to charge), ◊ shield, the dash button (hold to sprint); pinch with two fingers to zoom.

How it works

• The world is generated once as a color map plus a material map (grass, water, stone, dirt, trees, flowers, glow), with baked hill shading.
• A WebGL pass lights every cell (moonlight, drifting cloud shadows, up to 16 point lights), adds wind, water shimmer and mist, then picks a glyph per cell by brightness and material. A second pass draws those glyphs from a font atlas.
• The knight is AI-generated art (see art/) on green screen. python art/build_knight.py (needs Pillow, NumPy, SciPy) cuts each frame out, packs art/knight-atlas.webp + .json, and the game converts frames to ASCII at runtime, recoloring the cape per player.
• Every other class has its own run sheet, and every class has an effect sheet (weapons, projectiles, impacts, auras), all on green screen. python art/build_art.py finds each sheet's grid, keys out the green and packs small per-class atlases. The game loads an atlas only when someone plays that class, bakes the frames into ASCII in idle time, and falls back to the tinted knight and procedural effects until it arrives. Prompts for making more sheets are in art/PROMPTS.md.
• Minions, imps and the boss are "mobs" simulated by whoever owns them (a Necromancer owns their skeletons, the host owns the raid) and broadcast about 8 times a second as compact arrays. A hit on someone else's mob is sent to its owner. Each mob is one pre-rendered sprite, so a full raid costs a handful of draw calls.
• Multiplayer has no game server (src/net.js, Trystero). Players find each other through public Nostr relays and connect directly over WebRTC. When a direct link is impossible (mobile data, strict Wi-Fi), game messages fall back to short-lived events on those same relays, a little laggier but it works on any network. The longest-standing host keeps the shared state and two standby hosts can take over. ?relayonly in the URL forces the relay path for testing. An optional /api/turn Vercel function can hand out TURN credentials if CF_TURN_KEY_ID / CF_TURN_API_TOKEN are ever set.

Roadmap

1. World look, movement, camera, lighting
2. Spells, combat, damage numbers
3. Peer-to-peer multiplayer: Free for All, Team Deathmatch
4. Six classes with unique kits, three rotating maps, Boss Raid
5. See IMPROVEMENTS.md for the long list of what comes next