THE MAKING OF VERTICAL HOLD (Part 0)

Argh. The Art of Slacking is a mantra that seems to guide my existence lately. I've been promising this write-up, in one form or another, since the day after our demo hit the big screen at Revision 2024. But alas, I haven't been able to force myself to generate any inertia... mostly, I suspect, because it was such a huge effort in a short span of time, and the burn-out from it was all-encompassing. Indeed, it was almost six months down the line before I could even generate a sliver of interest in coding (which was really lovely, as I'm a programmer by trade, lol).

So here's my second attempt at explaining what utter nonsense entered, and then unceremoniously exited, my head during the production of what will surely go down in scene history as one of the more WAT demos ever shown. 

I had this idea, you see.

I was watching the live stream of Revision 2023, from the relative peace and comfort of my home here in the States, when I began to reminisce about the groovy time I had with friends at Assembly back in 2015. We presented our first demo "Pimp My Bento", and due to a fluke (and some *very* generous hosts) we ended up scoring a win in the Wild category with a hastily-constructed C-64 demo. We chalked it up to dumb luck and moved on, because really, if there had been any proper competition we would have been curb-stomped. However... the 5 manic months we spent learning to program the C-64 from scratch, and learning 6502 ASM, and making the demo, were among the best moments of my life. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: 0xDB and Bentacle are my brothers for life. We did something memorable, and got some laughs along the way. We couldn't ask for anythings more.

Except, maybe, to do it again. Not win, mind you -- just make a demo. Get some laughs. Let people know that we're still out there kicking it, and being weird as hell.

By the time I had finished the final day of the stream, I had convinced myself to go to Revision 2024. What with work and all, that's a fair commitment for someone across the pond, so to speak. By the end of the next day, I had convinced myself to not just attend in person, but to bring a demo along with me (for future reference, this means I had slightly less than a year to get a demo done).

I began in earnest, even though I had no clue what I wanted to do. The reality was that I just wanted to have some fun, and give people around the world a reason to stop for a few minutes and share a laugh with me (or not; comedy is subjective). I took my minigame framework, which is built on top of Raylib, and gutted it. I left in the actor and behavior code (which mutates the data in the actor blobs), and a few stock shaders, and started experimenting. I went back to a few old, classic scene effects, just messing around to find my footing, and hopefully some inspiration.

Along the way I wrote a brutally simple, yet effective, CRT shader, and before I knew it, a whimsical idea began to form in my head. It wouldn't achieve its final shape until almost the halfway point of the timetable, but I had no way of knowing that...

Stay tuned for the next part.