pouët.net

Showing the oldskool compos at 60 Hz was pretty bad.

From what I remember the internal broadcasting system doesn't support 50 Hz.

Noise level (especially during tracker music compo) was the main problem for me (that ****ing Assymylly stage with their noisy commentators...) I started wearing industrial ear protectors on Saturday which made hanging around scenelounge a bit more bearable. Food I got from Koskelantie street's Alepa (grocery store) so that was fine and cheap.

Not an excuse, but I think it's been like that "forever" at Asm (i.e. since the era of recording to SVHS ended), so at least it wasn't surprising.

the burgers was "kinda ok" I think.
the taco truck had so small tacos you needed a microscope to find it but charged as they was as large as their truck..

so. "yeah I guess"

"Fair Buffet by Pihka" was great! Also Tripla mall is 10min walk away with lots of great restaurants.

Yeah i used tripla during the day and evening when i needed a bite i checked the trucks.. nut yeah better trucks would be good

Is there any chance that we will get (on youtube or asm tv or wherever) the Arttech seminars from this year ?

Afaik they were not recorded due to some miscommunication :(

It was nice to be at assembly as a visitor for a change! I joined asm organizing 2012 so it's been a long time since I've visited assembly summer as a visitor the last time. I didn't see much more compos as I did when I was organizing but at least I could watch those more relaxed. :D

It was nice, thank you all organizers for the good work, keep it up! <3 I know there are so many volunteers in the organization pouring their heart into this event and doing their best. <3


I retired from the organizing duties after last year as I have so much going on in my life at the moment. I needed to priorize other stuff. So basically not enough time or spoons.

Assembly 2024 - how to make the Assembly GREATer again? 8)

Would love to hear opinions from the demo peoples for how to improve Assembly in the true scene spirits??

More seminars, more workshops, more compos, more demos shown at the big screens, more talks about demos, more of something elses?

Move esports related program to some other event, replace Jimms and Gigantti stores with Partco and Bebek, replace YouTube influencers with newsgroups legends, allow alcohol and cannabis inside, a seminar about how to become a pirate

Compos exhibited such that some YouTuber's Kahoot game isn't blasting over a music compo.

Do literally anything besides showing the same KAAaL videos from a decade ago over and over to discourage people disturbing compos (in the oldskool area I didn't watch a single compo without someone screaming or blasting music right by my ear)

Take like 10% of the prize pool of the smallest esports tourney and put together a scene prize pool.
Obviously people don't do this for money, but at some point it'll start coming down to "do we work on something for Assembly, where the prizes are 15€ trophies from a sports shop and the compos are overshadowed by some YouTuber screaming 10m away, or for one of the other parties where demoscene isn't just a legacy lineitem and an afterthought "

Also the prizegiving ceremony was just painful to watch, when 2/3 people on stage seemed like they'd never heard of the demoscene before...

I jokingly said I'll be surprised if there's anything demoscene related left the next year when Telia bought the event, but it seems I was just off on how long it'd take.

Put a fecking sound barrier between scene lounge and whatever loud stage it ends up next to, and fix whatever sounds problems there were on the set itself. It was embarrassing how bad some of those interviews were because people could not hear each other. Also find some way to show the things that the people are talking about. Discussing the 1k compo? Then show the 1k compo entries.

Coordinate with Boozembly so that compos don't clash with Boozedrome or other events.

Advertise the seminar schedules/contents better. Did they get recorded this year?

Showing demo clips from the first Assembly onwards on the big screen before the first compo block was nice! How about showing other compilations at scene lounge (or even the big screen) during downtime? Reach out to a bunch of different sceners and asked them to pick ten demos (or, say, 45 minutes worth) and write a few sentences of context about each one. Make video mixes of these. Show them on the screen.

Finally.. fix the typos on all the info slides. FWIW, my kid would *love* to proof-read and fix these but he's too young to volunteer.

yes that, I miss "demoreels" with some explanation of whats going on. Some dedicated screen with older prods not just from asm. A place where yiu know you can find similarly minded people.

evilpaul: There's no point in coordinating with "Boozembly" when it comes to Boozedrome, as that compo is organized by Dekadence :)

about that: fuckings to dekadence for stealing people away from the fantasy console competition screening! working on a fucktro as we speak! might also double as a boozedrome vii invitation, tbc!

For the defense of dekadence we might say that they had announced their event's time weeks (months?) earlier.

(check: had been announced in may)

boozedrome has been on the same day on the same time every year, the thinking being that it's early so as to not clash with other compos.. that michael bolton quote from office space comes to mind :)

As a former yearly and loyal visitor to Assembly, I honestly don't know what would be the thing to make me come back or what would improve the experience for me. The last times I have visited it's felt to me like a music festival with only one or two mildly interesting bands playing at awkward times. Yeah, you could buy the festival ticket to go and see the opening act on Friday and then the small stage closer on Sunday evening and then just randomly hang around in between while checking the phone and some other random bands, but it's just too much bother to do that for the payoff. I know the ASM demoscene organizers do their very best and the compos contain cool stuff, but in that environment everything I find interesting feels like an afterthought in the context of "e-sports", youtubers and all that. I'd rather release my own demos somewhere else too and share the moment of seeing it on the screen with an audience that does care.

My 2 cents, starting with what I liked:
- I loved the opening animation with the demo winners flashback. I agree with the suggestions on having more demo shows (preferably on the main screen)
- I was afraid that the demoscene part would have disappeared completely with the new owner and the stepdown of Pehu, I'm happy that this is not the case. Kudos to everyone working on the demoscene part of Assembly!
- Having placed 2nd again, I was positively surprized with the medals for the 2nd/3rd place. Previously only the winner got a cup and the 2nd/3rd only certificates.
- I still very much enjoy being at Assembly, it's not (only) the typical demoparty but I also enjoy the stands, shops, rythm games, concerts, cosplay etc.
- On the live partysite, having the schedule showing times in both local and "your local time" was great and avoided the "Aaah! I had to submit almost an hour earlier" that tripped me up a few times in the past.

About the prize pool: that is already done? They used to announce the prizes for the demoscene in advance (and I think it's the only party that went in the 4-digit euro range), and while they don't do that anymore, even after the online-only Assembly I still got some money several months after reaching a top-3 spot.

Some ideas for improvements:
- Over the years, the communication has shifted more and more to Finnish-only. That makes f.e. the talking part of the opening ceremony rather useless to me. Even having smaller English subtitles on the Finnish beamslides would help a lot.
- The oldskool mailinglist was pretty much dead? I think I only got 1 mail telling me the whole-event demoscene seats were already sold out. I regularly received Finnish mails with very little demoscene info, it would be nice to get at least 1 English mail telling us which early bird event is actually applicable to oldskoolers/demosceners, if we need to re-apply for oldskool status or re-make accounts etc. If the communication happened elsewhere, please point us to it in f.e. Pouet.
- Technical nitpick that's mostly my fault: On the main site, please make the language choice appear even if your browser doesn't have JavaScript enabled. For a long time, I thought only the compo rules were available in English, leading to the feeling the demoscene part of Assembly is getting very little attention.
- I missed some competitions that only happened in the scene lounge. Assing a "Fantasy Console compo in 10 minutes in the Scene lounge" would be a nice addition to the main screen slide/advert rotation.
- A shame the seminars were not recorded, I only noticed the one from Navis when it was almost done :(

Greets to everyone I met at Asm23 and thanks again to the organizers!

There's so much going on everywhere, dancers and cosplayers and millions of gamers on multiple stages, but it's easiest to just take a quick look at all that from afar and not even try to figure out what's going on, or what game they're playing. It's everything everywhere all at once, and the only way I can navigate is by looking at the scene timetable at scene.assembly.org. I imagine it's the same for "the others" around scene competitions. If it looks really interesting, then maybe stand around on the side for a couple of entries and walk away.

What I imagine I would prefer: Bring back the official AssemblyTV channel! Have it going on all the streaming sites all the time and show it on the main stage. Lift the best of all the "sub-events" into the Main Program. Make it look and feel like the it's the digital olympics. Keep showing scoreboards of important game championships and ... scene charts, I don't know. Keep everyone up to date on the timetable and what's happening on smaller stages in the next hour or two. Hype up some of the main events happening later in the evening. Have some feeling of consistency and structure.

I mean, I'm not into regular sports either, but I'll still watch the olympics.

Home appliance stores are in there having their own game compos with big name youtubers, and sometimes they just throw stuff away at the audience. If they want to bring in youtubers and throw stuff away, please let them host the real compos/events and give the stuff as prizes. Youtubers are apparently semi-professionals at reacting to things and being enthusiastic. Humans find that enjoyable. But always have experts around commenting in every field too. Make all the different kinds of compos/championships/events (gaming/scene/K-pop dance/cosplay) follow the same formula: "Do things really well, get prizes from sponsors".

Read the composlides out loud or at least somehow announce all the entries! It feels odd that such a major party happens without narration, when all the smaller parties have someone talking. You could make it more like a sports event, get some really quick expert comments/impressions in between the entries. Sometimes the 15 to 30 minute compo studios at Assembly have been awkward, because almost everyone (except Truck) is So Very Finnish. At best, someone gets a little bit enthusiastic about some kind of visual effect... that they describe using specialist vocabulary... that was shown on screen an hour ago. Get the comments right after the production and maybe an interested bystander could have a chance of catching what they're even talking about, maybe even to appreciate that whatever they just saw was actually exceptional for the machine that it was running on. Or something.

Most importantly, embrace and accommodate shadow events! You don't have to bend out of shape to coordinate with "unrelated" organizers, but you could consider talking with them when they get big enough. Just at the minimum you need to have eyes and read Pouët every few months to see what's going on.

Finally, when you cut a production short in a compo because it sucked, you could at least record the full version for Youtube / Assembly Archive. I struggle to understand the motivation to "archive" a half-demo capture.

Oh my, I am seriously pleased and happy to see how many good comments & feedback you all gave. I'm confident these feedbacks are gonna be read and get noticed by the ASM orgs, thank you everyone.

Lets keep the ASM demo scene spirits alive together! <3

Are you sure these will get seen and acted on? I sort of assumed that you were on the orga team and that's why you were asking. If not.. then.. are any orgas reading this thread?

While I"m busy replying - I will point out that I don't want to just sit here and complain, I would be happy to help implement this stuff if there is actual interest and resources available.