Rhys Gronow ships a walkable ASCII city with a 283KB Rust engine
After an earlier video passed 1 million views, the solo developer put a walkable browser prototype on Ko-fi during the week of Aug. 17-21.
By RuntimeWire Staff · Published
Primary source: Tom's Hardware
Why it matters
Gronow's prototype shows how a solo developer can pair Rust and WebAssembly with GPU-backed browser rendering to put a technically unusual game concept in players' hands, even though no full commercial production plan is disclosed.
Rhys Gronow, the South Wales hobbyist behind Grow Now! Games, put ASCII City Prototype 1 online this week, turning his video experiment into a walkable browser city with interiors, elevation and multiple floors. A Tom's Hardware examination found a 283KB Rust WebAssembly engine generating the world behind its shifting wall of characters.
Prototype access is being offered through Ko-fi. The available materials do not disclose a broader monetization plan, commercial release date or final scope.
Gronow calls himself a hobbyist who makes games he expects to enjoy playing himself. Grow Now! Games presents itself as a solo-development operation and lists the dreamlike adventure Recurring Dream, exploration game Eternal Trails and 2025 space game Space Tourist among its releases. The available materials disclose no outside investors, funding round or valuation. The ASCII city fits Gronow's stated interest in making the games he wants to play, while requiring a considerably more involved rendering stack than the studio's description of making "small easy games" might suggest.
A video experiment becomes a prototype
The first public version was presented as a walkable cyberpunk city contained in one HTML file. Roads, buildings, trees, cars and pedestrians exist in a grid-based world. PC Gamer reported that its custom ray-casting system casts rays from the camera each frame, identifies the first hit and uses distance to calculate perspective, depth and which surfaces occlude others.
That demonstration rendered at 120 by 56 characters. The playable version expands the display to 180 columns by 80 rows, putting 14,400 character cells on screen. Gronow also added indoor spaces, elevation and skyscrapers, changes shown in an update video released alongside the browser build.
The original video had passed 1 million views and reached 9,000 comments, according to Tom's Hardware. The available materials do not establish total revenue, retention or the playable build's user count.
The playable version remains a prototype. PC Gamer reported that Gronow was considering dialogue and a fuller game as possible future additions.
The limited scope gives the prototype a way to expose its visual and rendering systems before a larger game exists. Whether Gronow develops that larger game remains undisclosed.
The 283KB figure needs context
The city's visuals are composed of ASCII glyphs, but its delivery stack uses modern browser graphics. For a solo developer, the architecture separates world generation from display work: Rust produces the city's data, while JavaScript and WebGL handle the browser-facing renderer.
The 283KB number describes the Rust WebAssembly module rather than the complete game download or its total memory footprint. Tom's Hardware found that the module reserves 1,152KB of linear memory at startup. JavaScript, WebGL shaders, browser memory and generated graphics also contribute to the running build.
Rust passes packed data for buildings, surfaces, lighting and floor plans to JavaScript. The renderer draws the needed character and color combinations into a texture atlas, uploads that atlas to the GPU and displays the glyphs as textured quads. Tom's Hardware reported that the renderer batches every visible cell into one buffer upload and one drawArrays call per frame.
The implementation also provides fallback paths when WebGL is unavailable, and it reduces the visible grid on touch devices. Desktop sessions render 180 by 80 cells, while touch devices use 48 rows and between 96 and 168 columns, according to Tom's Hardware's inspection. Those choices let one codebase accommodate different browser capabilities without changing the ASCII presentation.
The updated architecture marks a quick evolution from the project's original presentation. Gronow initially emphasized that the demo used no Unity, Unreal, 3D models, textures or shaders. The current browser build still avoids a commercial game engine and conventional 3D assets, while WebGL shaders and a texture atlas move thousands of glyphs efficiently. Its ASCII appearance remains intact even though the browser ultimately renders GPU-backed textured geometry.
Ko-fi supplies the access point
Grow Now! Games is offering access to the browser prototype through Ko-fi. The available materials do not establish total revenue, retention, a long-term price or a broader commercial plan.
Open-source 3d.city also runs a city simulation with Three.js, WebGL and MicropolisJS. Its city-building focus differs from Gronow's first-person ASCII format, but it offers another example of a simulation workload delivered through browser graphics APIs.
Gronow has discussed dialogue and a fuller game, though neither has been announced as a committed release. Each addition would expand the workload for a solo developer working from a tightly controlled premise. The current build keeps that premise intact: a city visually made from text, generated by a compact Rust engine and developed by one person.