283KB on the wire, close to four megabytes in RAM: an ASCII city's real budget

The download figure is the smallest number in this build, and the file listing invites you to mistake it for the size of the thing. The module reserves 1,152KB of linear memory the moment it instantiates ^[2], roughly four times its weight on the wire ^[21]. The renderer then preallocates a 2.76MB vertex buffer and doubles it when a frame overruns ^[16]. Before you count the JavaScript, the shader pair or the atlas canvas, resident cost is already about fourteen times the fetch ^[22].

Divide the buffer by the grid and the geometry becomes legible. Desktop draws 180 columns by 80 rows, 14,400 cells ^[6], at six vertices apiece ^[4], which puts the preallocation at roughly 192 bytes per cell, near 32 bytes per vertex ^[26]. That is eight floats: a position, an atlas coordinate and not much else. All 86,400 vertices ride in the single upload ^[23]. Every cell is the same quad with a different lookup and the fragment stage is one texture2D call ^[15], so the batching costs nothing to arrange. Perspective comes from a custom ray-caster that fires rays from the camera each frame and uses first-hit distance for depth and occlusion, according to PC Gamer ^[20].

What the character grid buys is the absence of an asset pipeline. Nothing ships as a model or a texture; glyphs are drawn on the client with fillText, cached per character-and-colour combination, and uploaded once ^[4]. Download size therefore tracks code, and the code is generation: debug paths name city.rs, world.rs, population.rs, interiors.rs and rendering.rs ^[14], and the data crossing into JavaScript goes down to window styles, lit flags and floor plan IDs ^[3]. The corollary is that atlas growth is priced in palette rather than in city. More blocks cost nothing there. More hues do.

The engine also carries a separate 160 by 112 profile ^[7], 17,920 cells, a quarter more than the desktop display shows ^[24]; Tom's Hardware's inspection does not say what the surplus serves. Touch sessions drop to 48 rows and 96 to 168 columns ^[7], 32 to 56 percent of the desktop cell count ^[25], and two fallbacks sit beneath WebGL, a Canvas 2D drawImage path and a per-cell fillText path reachable with a ?direct parameter ^[8].

Grow Now! Games described the original demo to PC Gamer as having "no Unity, there's no Unreal, there's no 3D models, textures, or shaders" ^[9]. The build now playable compiles a shader pair and uploads a texture atlas ^[15][4]. Runtimewire's reading is that the ASCII presentation survives regardless, since what the browser draws underneath is GPU-backed textured geometry ^[12]. The video version filled 120 by 56 characters ^[17]; the playable one fills a little over twice as many cells ^[27]. Behind it is an audience of more than a million video views and 9,000 comments ^[11], and a studio that has disclosed no outside investors or funding ^[13]. PC Gamer reported Gronow is weighing dialogue and a fuller game ^[19]. On the evidence in the binary, the world can get much larger before the wire cost moves; the visual vocabulary is the part that has a price.