Week 7 was a reading week, so the only activity I partook in on campus was a formative feedback session with Adam.

Formative Feedback

While I still hadn’t decided fully on what to choose for my three game ideas, I did have some things in mind regarding the aesthetic of the game, and my current issues with balancing rhythmic or arrhythmic control and game “flow”. He recommended a few things to check out as further research, for example when I mentioned psychedelic visuals inspired by demoscene videos and possibly vector graphics he recommended checking out the work of the British game developer Jeff Minter and his studio Llamasoft. His game Tempest 2000 and its colorful wireframe visuals were definitely an influence, and inspired other games I looked at like the online remakes of the fictional game Polybius so this is something I definitely want to research more.

I also expressed interest in visuals from 90’s Demoscene culture. Computer demos, audiovisual experiences traditionally bundled with pirated copies of software, also contained music composed using trackers, which often featured or was inspired by popular electronic genres made in the same fashion such as jungle.

Conclusions

As a result, I began to more closely research the demoscene subculture, the results of which can be found in this post.