The Next Level – Work In Progress Shots

Whenever I write a demo, I try to take screenshots of the work as it develops. There are a couple of reasons for doing this. Firstly, it’s nice to look back and see the progress. Secondly, sometimes I work myself into a creative dead-end with a scene and it can be good to look back and get some inspiration from earlier variations.

I’m trying to figure out how to improve my working methods and the screenshots things has always worked well for me so, while working on The Next Level, I made a conscience effort to take more screenshots than normal.

I love looking at other people’s work-in-progress shots. Since I now have a load of shots of my own demo, I thought it would be good to share some of them with you.

Engine

The engine itself was a development from the one used in 0xAnniversary. That demo was based around voxels so it only ever had to render cubes. This time I added model loading and animation:

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The Next Level

At this year’s Assembly I released my latest Windows demo.

The demo is written in C++ with a healthy dose of DirectX 11 and HLSL. You can find a link to the binary on Pouet. Keep an eye out on the configuration menu for the super secret ZX Spectrum rendering mode ;)

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Glitchy CPU

Here’s a bit of fun – a virtual CPU that’s so bad that it’s memory keeps getting corrupted. What’s the point of that? Well.. it’s perfect for glitch art!

Image

So there’s a fictional computer that’s based around a fictional 8 bit CPU that has:
– 256 bytes of memory (used to store the program code and also doubles as registers)
– 29 different instructions (including drawing primitives like squares and circles)
– 2 addressing modes (immediate and indirect)
– 2 hardware (ie: not stored in main memory) registers (PC and SP)

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Retro Demoscene Coding

Another year.. another ARTtech seminar at Assembly. This time it’s on ZX Spectrum demo coding.

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Ant Attack Trainer for the ZX Spectrum

I’ve never written a trainer or a cracktro for a game. Sure, I hacked games for fun when I was a kid, and I shared these cheats with friends – but I never packed them up into a trainer or a cracktro. So I decided to write one, and I decided to go back to my roots and do something retro. First I took one of my favourite old games (the awesome Ant Attack by Sandy White) and hacked it. Next I wrote a trainer menu and crafted a delivery method to get the hacks into the game. Finally (and.. ok.. this is a bit more contemporary) I presented a talk about it at this year’s Assembly demoparty:

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Authentication and Encryption with ZeroMQ

ZeroMQ is great. The ZeroMQ guide is even greater – in fact it’s a great read even if you don’t plan on using ZeroMQ. But if you try to code something that isn’t covered in the guide then things can get a bit tricky. Sure, the guide teaches you how to run on your own but sometimes you can go so far out that you’re on your own. One of these “things” is authentication and encryption. ZeroMQ does support both of these out of the box since version 4, but it’s not in the guide. There are a couple of blog posts about it (exhibits one and two) but they cover a lot of ground quickly and, more annoyingly for me, they use CZMQ (a ZeroMQ extension library) and not just plain old ZeroMQ. Google for examples and.. well.. there’s nothing. And that’s why I’m writing about it now.

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JavaScript Simple Demo Framework

I’ve been thinking about “gamejams” lately, and how to change things slightly to make a “demojam” – a one or two day event where a bunch of people get together and make demos. One of the big problems I noticed when I ran gamejams in the past was that people often have no real idea of what they can actually achieve in such a short space of time. We would have people who worked at gamedev studios come along and spend the first half of the jam writing an engine before the realisation hit them that they were never going to get a game done. So.. no.. don’t do that. You need to hit the floor running. And if you want to work in a team then you can’t expect the other members to sit there twiddling their thumbs while you write the perfect render pipeline or asset system. You have to arrive at the jam with something that you can start creating content in from the moment you come up with your first idea.

Creating a demo engine that is suitable for a demojam is actually pretty simple if you make a few assumptions and cut a few corners. These days you can go a long way with some full screen shaders, post processing effects and maybe a few image overlays. That doesn’t even sound like an engine, more like a framework. So what if you could get such a demo framework? What would be the most accessible platform for it? How about somewhere with lots of readily available, high quality dev tools and libraries that can run pretty much anywhere? Well, now that WebGL has matured and anyone who’s programmed anything can pick up and learn JavaScript as they go along – how about making it web based? Enter Simple Demo Framework.
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Fingers Of Doom – Another PETSCII piece

Ok.. so here’s something that I completely forgot about – Fingers of Doom! It’s another online PETSCII animation in colaboration with Raquel Meyers. Music this time from Dan Brännvall and my JavaScript animation player was based on the C64 code from Johan Kotlinski.

fingersofdoom
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Ten Years, Two Demos, One Demoparty

At the recent Sundown demoparty I released two new Ate Bit demos – one for PC and one for ZX Spectrum.

0xAnniversary

First up is the PC demo, 0xAnniversary. The title is a pun on the the hexadecimal code for the number 10, which can be written as 0xa, and the fact that this year marks the 10 year anniversary of Ate Bit. To make it even more poignant, our first demo was released 10 years ago at the first ever Sundown.

0xAnniversary was written fairly quickly over a period of about five weeks. The demo was written mainly from scratch but borrowed a few key bits of code (mostly texture and shader loading) from AteBitVJ. Music is by 4mat.

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Omega Balls – Realtime Graphics Shot Breakdown

Here’s a realtime audio-visual experiment that I made recently. It’s a bunch of glowing balls, synced to the majesty of 4Mat’s track, “Omega”.

A few people have asked me how I made it. The short answer is that the video was rendered in real-time in my AteBitVJ app and captured using Fraps. I thought I’d take things a bit further and explain how the scene is constructed by doing a shot breakdown on a layer by layer basis.
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