#demoscene

bryns were at the Assembly demoparty in Finland, hanging out with other members of MARMOT. that part for sure was very cool, it's great to finally meet them. assembly did not quite hit the same energy as other demoparties we've been to; despite some very impressive releases, the demoparty part of the combined gaming event/demoparty/kpop event felt a little big vestigial. more on that if we manage to write a full party report.

our big PS1 prod wasn't ready for release in the end, but during the party I managed to use the models and make a little teaser for it...

so you can get an out-of-focus glimpse of where we're going with it, with a little pastiche of Finnish newscaster YLE and a last-minute model of Helsinki Cathedral, minus a few fairly important architectural features.

unfortunately this placed dead last in the 3D graphics compo!! not even close either, it was like 100 points behind. oh well. hopefully beings will like the actual demo a lot more.

also during the party we decided to join the game jam, cooking up an algorithm to render ultrasound-like slices of 3D models which was intended to be used for a parasitic worm exploring a body...

unfortunately the actual game part didn't get finished during the jam because 1. we decided to write the game from scratch on top of winit+wgpu instead of using Bevy like a sensible creature, which meant reinventing a number of wheels and 2. also during the party we contributed to Marmot's compofiller entry in the One Minute Demo competition:

muffintrap wrote the Love2D renderloop, raccoonviolet and vurpo modelled and textured the bunny, and then we woke up early in the morning a few hours before the deadline and helped code up the feedback tunnel shader effect and also threw some PBR on the bunny because why not. the first 15 seconds are sorta neat, would that we coulda finished the rest x3

lesson learned is basically: we can partycode demos and watch compos or join a game jam but trying to do both is pretty silly.

luckily other groups were more sensible. Byterapers (I know...) dropped a bunch of demos to celebrate their 40 year retrospective, getting a hat trick in the oldschool, one minute and PC demo competitions. Gray Marchers also entered a very impressive 300kb web prod featuring raymarched humanoid characters. new friend Pulu did some very cool entries in the wild compo, including a synchronised dance of hacked cleaning robots.

we also caught the 'Boozedrome' at 'Boozembly', a kind of satellite event happening in the woods just outside the event hall. basically drinking isn't allowed at Assembly (they're pretty strict about making sure nobody smuggles beer inside a PC case or anything), so there's a secondary demoscene event, with a single compo focused entirely on Amiga hardcore music. it's pretty silly. here's Miku the raccoon and the blue shark bestowed on us by @hamiltonianflow hanging out...

very cool to witness this (a bunch of Finnish guys in a wood); we danced for a bit but then went in for the main compos because it was way too hot out there.

the non-demoscene parts of the party were very fascinating: this is a huge event, maybe second only to Gamescom. people were bringing their tricked out custom gaming PCs to fill the hall, and often heavily decorating their PC areas as well (with a competition for coolest PC/computer place; you can see the winners here). a lot of esports took place which is as opaque to us as the demoscene probably is to the gamers. there were also various old game consoles set up, along with a number of imported Japanese rhythm games from Helsinki's Japanese arcade Sugoi. the audience skewed pretty young, especially compared to other demoparties we've attended, and it was fascinating walking around the hall and seeing what people were playing.

the KPop side of things was rather more unexpected. this seems to have been a thing since last year, sponsored by the actual Korean embassy, and various groups went up on stage over the weekend to do impressively synchronised dances. there was some tension here since I think sceners felt that it was pushing aside the actual demoscene stuff and it's pretty hard to work on a prod with all the noise, but it was still pretty cool to see.

the hall at Assembly is absolutely enormous, as these rather grainy photo might hint...

It's hard to convey the sheer scale of the room and that screen at the front, but you could easily pack four Revisions in there. there were other halls too, with a few big shops selling computer bitz, and various other tables - among them a cool group from Tampere hacklab who'd set up their laser engraver. (we got to briefly visit the Helsinki hacklab too which is shockingly well equipped.)

sadly we didn't catch the Assembly tradition of the 'siika march', where the kids form a long chain with hands on each others' shoulders and do a circuit of the building saying 'siika' (whitefish); it's also known I think as the Elefanttimarssi. here's a video of it from 2012 though.