ROBERT LI

technical game designer 		LinkedIn
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VESSEL

Vessel is a 3D puzzle game that invites you to explore the ruins of an ancient civilization that once wielded the power of Water.

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Guided by a network of static cameras, you'll navigate intricate environments filled with secrets waiting to be uncovered.

You play as a broken pot, resurrected by a mystical water spirit and granted the extraordinary ability to SWAP-a power that lets your exchange places of the water spirit with pieces in your surroundings. With this newfound ability, embark on a journey to reclaim your missing pieces and unravel the forgotten mysteries of a world shaped by water.

The Basics

This document uses a few extra classes here and there, but mostly it’s just markup. This, for instance, is a regular paragraph.

Look at this horizontal break:

Lovely. We can hide stuff in the <details> element:

Lists

This is a plain old bulleted list:

Ordered lists look pretty much as you’d expect:

  1. Goals
  2. Motivations
    1. Intrinsic
    2. Extrinsic
  3. Second-order effects

It’s nice to visualize trees. This is a regular unordered list with a tree class:

Tables

We can use regular tables that automatically adjust to the monospace grid. They’re responsive.

Name Dimensions Position
Boboli Obelisk 1.41m × 1.41m × 4.87m 43°45’50.78”N 11°15’3.34”E
Pyramid of Khafre 215.25m × 215.25m × 136.4m 29°58’34”N 31°07’51”E

Note that only one column is allowed to grow.

Forms

Here are some buttons:

And inputs:

And radio buttons:

Grids

Add the grid class to a container to divide up the horizontal space evenly for the cells. Note that it maintains the monospace, so the total width might not be 100%. Here are six grids with increasing cell count:

If we want one cell to fill the remainder, we set flex-grow: 1; for that particular cell.

ASCII Drawings

We can draw in <pre> tags using box-drawing characters:

╭─────────────────╮
│ MONOSPACE ROCKS │
╰─────────────────╯

To have it stand out a bit more, we can wrap it in a <figure> tag, and why not also add a <figcaption>.

┌───────┐ ┌───────┐ ┌───────┐
│Actor 1│ │Actor 2│ │Actor 3│
└───┬───┘ └───┬───┘ └───┬───┘
    │         │         │    
    │         │  msg 1  │    
    │         │────────►│    
    │         │         │    
    │  msg 2  │         │    
    │────────►│         │    
┌───┴───┐ ┌───┴───┐ ┌───┴───┐
│Actor 1│ │Actor 2│ │Actor 3│
└───────┘ └───────┘ └───────┘
Example: Message passing.

Let’s go wild and draw a chart!

                      Things I Have
                                              
    │                                     ████ Usable
15  │
    │                                     ░░░░ Broken
    │
12  │             ░            
    │             ░            
    │   ░         ░              
 9  │   ░         ░              
    │   ░         ░              
    │   ░         ░                    ░
 6  │   █         ░         ░          ░
    │   █         ░         ░          ░
    │   █         ░         █          ░
 3  │   █         █         █          ░
    │   █         █         █          ░
    │   █         █         █          ░
 0  └───▀─────────▀─────────▀──────────▀─────────────
      Socks     Jeans     Shirts   USB Drives

Media

Media objects are supported, like images and video:

A room in an old French castle (2024)

They extend to the width of the page, and add appropriate padding in the bottom to maintain the monospace grid.

Discussion

That’s it for now. I’ve very much enjoyed making this, pushing my CSS chops and having a lot of fun with the design. If you like it or even decide to use it, please let me know.

The full source code is here: github.com/owickstrom/the-monospace-web

Finally, a massive shout-out to U.S. Graphics Company for all the inspiration.