ASCII swirl

A dark screen is full of small monospace text, lines of short sayings about design, and the whole field turns in a whirlpool. The centre spins fast and the rim barely moves, so the lines smear into spirals near the middle and stay readable at the edges. Within about two seconds a word in slanted ASCII art, ASCII on the card, condenses out of the soup and holds, brighter than the text around it, while the field keeps turning past it. A soft CRT pass curves the screen, adds scanlines and a little colour fringing, and darkens the corners.

Every cell is real text, never a picture. Each frame, every cell's position is rotated about the centre by an angle that grows as the radius shrinks, the rate over the radius with a floor of 0.1 so the middle does not spin to infinity, and the source text is sampled at the rotated position. That one rule makes the whirlpool. The word comes from a figlet face rendered into rows of characters; a stencil marks its letter bodies, counters included, and over 1.8 seconds, eased, the cells inside the stencil hand over from the swirl's character to the word's.

It stays fast because every glyph is drawn once. The printable ASCII range and two block characters are rasterised into one atlas at the cell size, and each frame the cells go to the GPU as instanced quads with their own atlas rectangle and colour, into a framebuffer that the CRT pass reads. The grid is 22 rows divided by the zoom, so a smaller zoom means more, smaller cells and room for a longer word.

The playground carries the extras the same engine supports, a cursor trail that stirs and lights the letters it passes, shockwaves on a click, ink that flows through a colour gradient, an ambient churn in four wave shapes, nine figlet faces and a word of your own.