pouët.net

What is your favourite demo you have worked on?

Why do you think the demo succeeded?
What could others learn from the demo?
What were your biggest hurdles?

Toolset, Engine, Style, Directing? The most positive comment you got? Best thing about it? The money shot?

Maybe this thread already exists, but I don't remember one existing for quite a good while. Hopefully this turns out to be an encouraging thread.

What is your favourite demo you have worked on? Hue Bender by Team210
Why do you think the demo succeeded? The track was beyond killer, on a level where I suspect even tho I had really pretty visuals, I still got carried by it :) and I had newly developed a shiney illumination model and high-quality color gradient tech.
What could others learn from the demo? How to use color maps.
What were your biggest hurdles? It's a one-shader prod. The shader was immensely long and my iteration & animation strategy was "hard-code animation curves into GLSL source", that's inherently complex & clunky as a creative workflow.
Toolset, Engine, Style, Directing? Python player, single GLSL shader, my own color gradient editor for packing stuff. Directing: Try to match track energy with tight syncs. Style: Glossy geometry, "Effektgeballer".
The most positive comment you got? https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=96948#c1007349
Best thing about it? The music.
The money shot? I'm not sure I'd mark a specific view as money shot - I sat hours and hours to make sure not to fall behind in quality in any scene of the demo. but if I had to pick: https://media.demozoo.org/screens/o/d2/bf/3039.343690.png

Sexadelic


It was 4th in the competition :)


More house music please (Hi Aegis :D)


Staying up. We basically had one P166 for doing everything at Mistral's place. When other hacked away, other slept. We bought Pirkka Kaakao-Kahvi packets and Pepsi Max to stay up.

Other one was getting the videos to the end of the demo. Basically had to send the VHS cassette to Tampere for grabbing the frames. Video was randomly shot during the long sexy midsummer midnights.


Engine and scripting was really, really easy with the (B)-Engine. Best thing about it? It still looks quite good IMHO :)

Ok I’ll bite…



There are so many demos i’ve worked on that it is near impossible to choose one, but one of my favorites has to be 1995



I guess it hit a nerve, and the sublime soundtrack (both the one in the demo proper as well as the remix in the credits part) is a huge part of that. Furthermore neither mfx nor Kewlers were exactly the poster boys of ”traditional” demo aesthetics, so maybe that also helped.



_Everything_ depends on the soundtrack. To make a killer demo you need a memorable soundtrack, and you need effects, pacing etc that supports that soundtrack. I mean people seem to love 1995 even though some of the visuals are less than stellar because of stupid things i did to all the cool fx curly brace, pommak and 216 worked on.



Time.

Roughly two weeks before Assembly 2006 curly brace and little bitchard asked me ”hey we have this half finished demo we were making for Breakpoint 2006 with Zomb but never finished it. Do you want to take a look and see if you could finish it for Assembly 2006?”.

Roughly half of what you see in the demo was developed during those two weeks while the other half was already there. If my memory serves me right more or less the following was completely new stuff: the opening sequence, the raytraced balls, the greetings part (apart from the twister), the starfield and the head watching demos. Everything else came from the unfinished demo, but most of that stuff was also tweaked.

Additionally 2-3 days before assembly started Pommak and i realized the demo is still missing ”that special something”, and thus we added the credits part, which i think/hope is a major reason why the demo is still so memorable.



We used GLUE, the Kewlers demo engine (which grew out of the source code of Variform).

Stylewise we went for an unabashed ”classic” demo style, with disparate effects, fake boasting (hello ”zero polys and shaders”), greetings… All the things some of us actually really dislike in demos ;)

As for direction: the vocals of the track were the main driving force here. Other than that it’s ”just an effects show”.



I think the 19 cdc’s and the two scene.org awards are positive comments enough :)

The best thing about 1995 is definitely the (maybe now ”iconic”) soundtrack, and as for the money shot… for me it’s definitely the end credits which wrapped the whole thing up in a nice little uplifting package.

have several, hard to pick one: life after, your song is quiet pt2, the lost religion of light and more recently assemblytv megademo and en-tropy

life after was visualice doing the entire demo using my track, i had no real input or preview of the demo but it's still one of my favorites because it really captured the audio sentiment i was going for in the track: of introspection, isolation, lost in travelling, unrestlessness, longing, sadness etc. it performed poorly at the compo and feels like it's mostly unknown to others, so not that successful in terms of popularity, but it accomplished well what it was trying to transmit. was all made using werkzeug 2 as far as i know.

your song is quiet pt2 i had a much deeper involvement in the process, constant discussions with elph on the concept and the flow, back and forth exchange of effects, ideas and drawings. he already had a pretty solid original idea to being work from, but we polished it well together and the end result was pretty awesome in terms of direction and flow, love doing demos for oldschool platforms where the end result doesnt feel like it was restricted by the platform so i was very happy with how this turned out. it won altparty, and had a great positive response from the speccy scene. was all hand coded by elph, even the splines / line drawing growing scenes were converted from drawings to svg paths by hand and converted to speccy data.

the lost religion of light was done in residence with kosmoplovci in belgrad, we spent over a week fitting the visuals with the track that had already been selected. we knew we wanted slow pace, abstract, black and white and to use some of the wireframe 3d models and drawings from some of the kooi members. we had an engine that already loaded lightwave models and moved images based on script data, i took a couple of days to add in fine fft audio response on some scenes to make some elements of some scenes more reactive. the rest was tuning the pacing and rewatching and wondering if it was maybe too slow or too fast. the compromise mostly fit my vision of the pacing and i was very happy with the result, one of the best minimalrtifact and kosmoplovci demos. the demo got last place at function and is mostly ignored ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ hungary demoscene audience didn't "get" ambient demos back then i guess.

assemblytv megademo was fun to work on for entirely different reasons, it was a much more "made to win the assembly party" sort of demo, and was very happy that i managed to persuade other folks to contribute to the megalomaniac project and actually bring it to life, i think it turned out pretty good even though it was missing a few scenes from the original plan. it pays hommage to a lot of assembly classics while still having a spin of it's own. mixes oldschool effects and new techniques, on a platform that hadn't been that deeply explored for full fledged demos (that used multiple carts) back then, so it helped pave the way for the fantasy console competition at assembly aswell (still fuckings to boozedrome clashing with the screening), not many tools per se, or well, some of the devs involved ended up doing some of their own tooling / deconstruction, like for the stickman's world demake part, and we did abuse a custom version of ticmctile to load large graphics on the tic80 that would never fit the sprite ram memory. we also had to come up with a custom way to sequence the scenes and optimize the demo for performance on slower machines (greets to gigabates who did a lot of work there). no meteorik nomination still stings a bit.

en-tropy was all hand coded by navis, we talked about the soundtrack and the direction quite a while before he started coding it, he doesn't do invitation demos but he was interested in maybe messing with typography in a demo and collaborating with me again so he picked a song out of a bunch of my style of dark ambient / drone / glitch tracks which i edited it a few times to fit the timmings of the demo. the original demo plan got derailed by some found experiments and we ended up not actually using typography much which made the demo take a new course (less invitation, more introspective build up). we went back and forth with previews and new versions of visuals and music and even the last edit that i did where i remade the drums to feel more organic and played slowly was scrapped in favor of the original more monotone version (which i still dont entirely like the drums on that one). was pretty happy with the end result, the fast glitching vs slow pace worked really well, the scenes had the immersion and conveyed the deeper message well. doesnt work that well as a traditional invitation demo, but i dont care. people really liked it at the partyplace (which surprised me a bit, i'm so used to getting shit for noise and glitch soundtracks) but again, no meteorik, sad times.

Letäs go with Litterae Finis.

I possibly could have gone with gateways, my assembly winner, which launched my career, but it's been so long I can't really remember much about the process. =)


Well, it won the 1st place in the TMDC, and I feel it's the best textmode demo I've made.


Music is 90% of the impact. But the demo has to hilight features in the music, and vice versa, to work. The sum needs to be bigger than the individual parts. The fact that I got the priviledge of using !Cube's music in Litterae Finis is a large part of why it was successful.


I actually didn't intend for Litterae to be monochrome, and spent a lot of time trying to invent a new "color ascii art" system (that came later), but in the end went with it as is, and I think it ended up being better than if I had forced color.


I use what I call "silly little demosystem" which I basically rewrite for every demo. Effects are functions that get a time tick, with a mess of switch-cases and else if chains for scheduling, sometimes the effect calls overlap, etc. Not super great, but works for me.

As for design process, I listen to the soundtrack with my eyes closed, and try to implement whatever comes to mind. I spend hours with audacity to pick the timing cues from the music, and drop those into the demosystem.

Money shot is probably the zoomer that zooms ascii art in ascii art.

Der Trabant


I still can't forget the audience's reaction.


Nothing. It's valuable to me.

What's my favorite? day trip

I don't know if it succeeded

I got to work with forcer on this demo! what a cool guy!! super easy to work with.

I'm not sure if I'll do another mega drive demo. I've been looking at game-boy. I like C and sdcc has a z80 compiler.

Maybe it’s not exactly on topic, but… a 256-byte intro: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=94380
Because that one came together surprisingly easily. It took me literally a couple of days, and every stage of coding went smoothly, without any brain freezes, which is not typical for me :). And the result completely satisfied me.



It looks nice :)



The answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything



Drawing the ASCII-logo in the source asm-file.



All comments :)

bitl> woah! hell maze is wicked awesome

Too many to choose, probably Led Blur

It was great experience coding for something that is no directly running on the PC compiler, but have the hurdle of transfering to the SMC card and inserting and testing and back. Eventually I even build an emulation of the basic functions on PC for direct testing. Also first demo where I tried to make some actual 3d polygons, gouraud, texture, which was a dream for me before, being only confined in mostly 2d effects in my previous demos. The bubbly GP32 is still one of my favorite memories.

Why it succeded? I don't know. It's formed the way other demos formed. Random effect put together, music was catchy and I tried to sync the parts (and I always do this manually for some reason instead of having the tracker tell me), it has some better flow maybe, a lot of oldschool parts and a unique platform at the time.

What could others learn from the demo? I don't know. GP32 is cool. Making some PC port high level emulation layer is very helpful for direct testing/debugging on the compiler, I did it on some other platforms sometimes if easy and possible (although I am building one for 3DO right now which is bigger work).

What were the biggest hurdles? I can't remember. It was a long process where I was just testing code and effects on the hardware. Then I decided to make them all in a demo and all came together.

The most positive comment? A lot of them, I don't know.

Lets try that again... (rolleyes_emoji) Sexadelic

Sexadelic was an inspiration (and please don't be offended - I was 16 years old, it's from 2001...) for TPB-01. Loved the credits part in sexadelic. That dude in his cheap car flipping up his middle finger; gold.

As to answer the actual question, in 2001 I wore a name tag that said MR. SEX so obviously my greatest accomplishment is Hyperventilation by Byterapers.

remy looks sexy in those shades :)

You mean that Frenchman called LeBeau? Yeah he does. But getting the finger by I believe a certain Armand Desmaison is also a sight to behold is it not? :)

no doubt

Fuck I need o wathc Sexadelic now. And that's not a bad thing. Also to honestly answer, in the almost 30 years I've been trying to fuck around in the demoscene I only made one demo that I don't really hate, and that's the last one (Revision 2023). Sad, I know, but we can't all be superstars.

I almost made a c64 demo, but rasterinterrputs is not that genious. So I rather laughed it away. And later got annyoed with sine scroll table lookups in intros. I would rather do an IIR feedback for this, excluding waste of cycles. Later supposedly genious scene coders did not even use the Gayle on the a1200, but rather was lowsize coders?

Concluding with, I am just too good for this, and discussion would just be vain, and left it to its own types.

Almost making a demo jus tells is you're Truck but unlike Truck you don't get away with being a lazy, untested, incompetent sideshow act.

Sounds like you know nothing about Truck then.

Because he's none of those things. (I don't know what "untested" is supposed to mean though)

Proof it. Simple question. No backtalk: links to actual content.

Excuse me, prove it. My English goes from bad to worse when I'm answering someone who was kicked by a horse at age 2.

nice work, gentlemen. grow up.