pouët.net

Post Mortem

Here’s how I ended up submitting a compo filler at EVOKE 2025...
In fact, I had this bigger, ambitious demo project where I wanted to explore a lot of themes that matter to me in the demoscene and I had talked with Alkama who was interested in making the soundtrack, with a nice technical challenge involved (no spoils).

For EVOKE 2025 the deadline was clearly too short and I would have just ruined the prod by forcing a release no matter what, especially since the last few weeks were quite busy with the revision of an article I’ve been working on for months... Anyway...!

My minimum goal was originaly to brainstorm with Alkama by showing him bits of storyboard and a visual mockup using placeholder meshes in my company’s 3D engine.

In the end, Alkama couldn’t make it to EVOKE and about two weeks before the party, having just finished revising my article, I woke up one morning with the idea of turning my mockup into a “compo filler.”

I contacted one of the teachers at the local design school, who makes drone music, and borrowed a track from him that was originally done for an unfinished game project. Since my wife is an amateur art photographer, I took advantage of that creative momentum to bring her into my demoscene shenanigans. It was also a way to make her a little more familiar with this strange world where she sometimes sees me disappear for days, only to come back home with Pouet frontpage on my laptop screen 24/7.

So the result is a compo filler demo whose ambition was mainly to test a few visual and technical ideas which, from what I felt with friends at the party place and the EVOKE audience, worked rather well.

Gargaj’s analysis is very sharp:

- our engine (mostly Xbarr’s work, with very specific contributions from Mooz) features a rendering pipeline with SSGI and SSR, smoothed by TAA. The “screen space” nature of it is sometimes visible, with light effects appearing and disappearing a bit abruptly. I pushed the rotary buttons to 11 (like multiplying the irradiance by 4 within the main illuminance shader...), to counterbalance the overall dark-ish atmosphere, hence the visible artifacts, probably.

- even in my original plan of presenting a mockup to Alkama, I was already seriously behind schedule. So between the moment I decided to make this filler and the deadline, I had just enough time to assemble the environment like "Lego" parts, but indeed half-arsed some geometry and scene setup.

- the camera is hand-animated in the sense that I placed the cameras one by one in the scene, with a linear interpolation across 8 points. That’s what gives it that mix of smoothness and bumpiness. I still haven’t managed to properly use our engine’s animation system, so I went for a Lua-scripted interpolation, which in the end remains faithful to my original intention.

- the photos and monitors do look a bit like a “virtual flea market”, I admit. I’ve been using those 3D meshes since my projects “Amiga Memories” and “Owl Arcade”, and I like to reuse them in here and there as a link to the retro background of the demoscene. The rush meant it seems to be hanging a bit from nowhere :) … But it was also a safe setup (timely-wise) to highlight my wife’s photos.

- the 3D models mostly came from a kitbashing archive, mixed with some olders models of mine. The kitbash mostly came untextured, but I managed to give it a passable look with a unique PBR texture (albedo, ORM, normal), combined with an ambiant occlusion pass that I baked object by object with FaoGen (an old but fast tool). The baked AO turned out to be a good complement to the relative instability of the engine’s SSGI.

In the end, I didn’t have much ambition in terms of ranking for this prod, given the context of how it was made… A 5th place suits me just fine. I got some great IRL feedback at the party, and it also allowed me to involve two people outside of the scene, which for me is also a really nice achievement.