Demoscene Basics from a Basic Demoscener

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2024-12-31 02:00:04

Most ‘getting started’ guides about the demoscene either don’t dive into the technical side more than a mention, or jump straight into installing OpenGL and DirectX and assume you already know a fair bit of the basic trig and math used for demos. This guide tries to hit a decent middle-ground.

Today, it’s not that hard to get started writing demo effects, and stringing them into a full demo. In this guide we start off with some simple platforms that just let you get creating – start moving pixels on the screen, getting beeps and bloops through your headphones, and actually ending up with a demo that other people can run.

Optimally, you should know a bit of programming before you dive into this. I try to take it slow but knowing what functions, variables, and just what code generally looks like will definitely be useful.

My name’s Daniel, or pixienop. If you have any questions, issues, or just wanna say hi, feel free to DM me! I’ve made one demo so far with another one in the works, so I know how intimidating just getting started can be. Hope this guide’s useful!