Thu
12
Aug 2010

I've already mentioned that Assembly 2010 demoparty took place recenly. Now let me share with you my impressions about the productions from this party.

Gamedev category, with 19 productions this year, is bigger than demo, intro 4k or intro 64k, which was suprising for me. I've always thought demoscene is about making demos and that they don't like making games so much. But I'm not impressed by these games. Most of them have neither interesting gameplay like indie game developers do nor advanced graphics technology like demosceners put into their demos. Still games from higher places are much better than the other and the game from the first place - Tricky Truck by Archee (which is a driving simulation with physics where you have to park a truck) paid my attention for quite a long time.

About executable music, my favourites are actually the tunes from the bottom of the results - Pure Life 2.0 by Silent (place 7/9) and My Happy Place by Prophecy (place 8/9). But this surely is the matter of taste. I can see that voters prefered more retro-oldschool-style productions.

When it comes to "real wild" category, aggregating demos for exotic platforms, several web-based were presented. My favourite ones are Ballmer Peak by Department of Offense (place 4/7) and Spiral out by evoflash (place 1/7). I didn't know such amazing and even 3D graphics could be done in Flash.

About intros, for the first time I've seen a 4k intro where EXE unpacks itself to a temporary directory as HTML + SWF and then opens the actual Flash demo in the web browser. Atleeti by Archee is definitely a phenomenon. An intro with not good graphics or music, which scored 2nd place probably just because they've appreciate that it's very original piece of technology. Its idea is similar to Darwinism, which scored 1st at Breakpoint 2010. The 4k intro from the 1st place - Neanderstaller by Pittsburgh Stallers - looks great. It's definitely worth watching more than any other.

As for 64k intros, I liked them all. About demos, I recommend watching first 6 places. The demo from 2nd place - Ceasefire (all fall down..) by CNCD vs Fairlight - is the continuation of the famous Agenda Circling Forth (1st place at Breakpoint 2010). For me they are great examples showing that there is not good graphics VERSUS "real" artistic value, but the advanced technology and high computational power may well serve art by making it possible to do something stylish like this, where all the graphics is made of dots (particles). Details of this technology can be found on direct to video blog. The demo that scored 1st place - Happiness is around the bend by ASD - is especially worth seeing. It's long, beautiful, original, well designed - definitely something new or at least something of the highest quality that can be found on the demoscene nowadays.

Comments | #demoscene #events Share

Comments