Hello, I'm Mathieu M. alias "Alkama".
I'm french, I'm a musician, a coder, and a member of the demoscene since the early 90s.
In my free time, you'll find me producing electronic music or coding realtime 3D computer-graphics.
I'm member of the TPOLM, Calodox and Spectrals demo groups.
The demoscene consists in creating executable programs that run in real time and produce audio and visuals with no user interactions. It should run on a freshly installed machine, with no network, and without playing pre-rendered video files. It is not forbidden to use existing 3D engines like UE or Unity, but a lot of demomakers prefer to tailor their own engine.
tl;dr: It's like a video game where you dont have any control.
Demomakers (we also say demosceners) assemble in parties across the globe, called Demoparty, where we compete in different compos (competitions segmented in categories where the audiance votes for their favorites). We release most of our productions at those demoparties. There are also many categories for individual works like photos, graphics, streaming music, tracker music, animations and videos, ... or for binary executable files categorised by size limits and platform, like PC Demos, PC 4k Intros, Oldschool Demos (for platforms like Amiga, Atari, ...)
Some categories include size limitations where your whole production (executable file) must not be larger than a given threshold. For example 64 kilobytes, 4 kilobytes, 256 bytes...
Most of the fun comes from pushing the limits while producing nice looking and sounding content. There's no money to gain, just the respect and enjoyment of fellow demosceners and the pleasure of teaming-up with friends to make a creative project. Demos are also a rare case of instant gratification: it's immediate eye sugar! And not many things beat the stage fright, but also pride and excitement of seeing your production play on the big screen and loud soundsystem of a Demoparty, with friends and peers reacting to it.
The process of crafting a production from the ground up also means learning and sharing a lot of nice tricks.
To learn more about the demoscene, please refer to the wikipedia article .
We comment demoscene productions on sites like Pouet.net and Demozoo.org is doing its best cataloguing all existing productions.
To the SESSIONS (demoparty in Shizuoka / Japan) website, for the idea of using frames upon video backgrounds.