Inspiration
Sean and I have been watching demos in his basement for years. We always admired the demoscene community, but were intimidated by the level of effort and difficulty in programming a demo. There's no better day than today.
What it does
Demos are a demonstration of artistry and programming ability. There is no user interaction or input, it is purely a gesture of romanticism to the hardware.
How we built it
For our demo, we used PICO8, a fantasy console meant to mimmick 8bit consoles of the the 1980s. Music, sprite creation, and code are all self contained within PICO8. That being said, there are strong limitations on file size, color pallete, processing power, and sound.
Challenges we ran into
At one point in the Hackathon Sean's computer decided to become a toaster. We thought we had lost half of our project with less than 12 hours left in the competition. Additionally, some effects, such as the raycasting (long hall way) code repeatedly caused PICO8 to crash with no error reports.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Sean's proud of the grey synthwave grid in the "greetz" section. Katie's proud of writing the moire effect without consulting the internet.
We're both proud to have finished this prod (that's short for "production")!
What we learned
Demo making (at least, on PICO8), isn't as mystical as we thought.
What's next for Debut
More effects! More tunes! Maybe port it to the Commodore 64.
Built With
- elbow-grease
- pico8
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