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Saxonia Issue 02 Part 026
Smaller demos please
By Rumrunner/VOID
[l
Now, what do I mean when I say that I want to see more small demos? It's
simple, really. I want to see more demos without lots of scanned pictures,
and one single module would be just fine.
[l
Let's take a look at the demos of yesteryear. I would like to mention
some of them :
Hunt For 7nth October - Cryptoburners
Cubeomatic - Spreadpoint
Who cares - Mr Gurk/Phenomena
Now, what do all these demos have in common? They are not huge archives
that takes up several megabytes for one. They are not even trackloaded,
in fact, they only fill up a couple hundred kilobyte, and even less.
So, you could probably put all of the three mentioned demos on one
single DD disk.
They also have another thing in common. They contain ideas that, at the
time of release, was completely new and revolutionary (well, perhaps not
Who Cares. Mr Gurk told in another demo released as part of a megademo
that he was the first to put 200 bobs on screen, so he too has had some
"firsts" though). But back to the main point. If you release such a
small demo today, would it be considered a demo? Sadly, I think that many
would look upon it as being only an intro. Most people seems to have
forgotten what an intro really is. They are meant to introduce something.
Either a mag, some news from a group (although intros to tell about new
groupmembers seem to have dissappeared at some point in time), or
something else. So, as far as I am concerned, many intros should rather
be called demos.
The problems of calling a small demo anything but an intro today is
easy to spot. When competing with bigger productions at a party, who will
vote for the demo with only one module, and only an intropicture? I know
I would, if the demo was good enough, but I don't think that many others
would. In some ways, I miss the times when a demo was a coder's product,
a musicdisk was the product of the musician, and the slideshow belonged
to the graphician. At that time, it was much easier to say "good demo".
The demo was good because of the code. Perhaps the first reflections
people made over this subject was after the release of State of the Art
by Spaceballs? Many people didn't consider it a demo at the time, because
it only contained one big routine (in addition to some effects in the
background). The same also happened with Odyssey from Alcatraz. Some
people said that this had to be precalculated, and therefore wasn't a
demo. Others simply called it a movie-demo, to separate it from, let's
say the "real" demos.
Now, I have been touching several topics in this article, but what it
all comes down to is that there are several positive points about making
smaller demos. Seeing your work finished motivates you for doing bigger
projects later on, and can be a fine "hobby" inbetween 2-3 year lasting
winnerdemo-projects. Also, smaller demos are a good way to let newcomers
into the scene. In the start, it's hard enough to keep everything in mind
so perhaps it's wise to keep those 14 textures for use another time.
