I never realised you could encode each column of Doom as a single character, but of course you can! I suppose the one thing missing would be distance, but if you get 8 bits per character I you could reserve the upper bits to represent approximate distance.
That's weirdly inspiring! What other games can I make where the visuals are conceptually no more than a line of characters, but which can get macroexpanded into immersive graphics?
Another point to note is that you aren't stuck with a single character to encode a column of Doom as text. You could also do something like a letter to represent the content, followed by a number to represent the distance.
I think the only weird part about that is that certain letter-number pairs may be a single token with some other semantics in the model, and other letter-number pairs would be a pair of tokens. I think that could impact the performance of the model (but probably not by a huge amount).
That's weirdly inspiring! What other games can I make where the visuals are conceptually no more than a line of characters, but which can get macroexpanded into immersive graphics?