r/Demoscene

Wishlist on Steam here via this link.

I’m learning an awful lot while making this game, and honestly, I’m very aware that I still have a long way to go. I’m sorry if some of the influences feel obvious at this stage, but I’m trying to absorb, learn from, and honour the things that first made me fall in love with this kind of work.

The story takes huge inspiration from the sparks of William Gibson’s 80s imagination, the social paranoia running through Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, the brilliant design thinking of Zachtronics, and old-school favourites like Uplink, alongside more recent games such as Grey Hack and Hacknet.

I’m trying to take those influences with humility, learn as much as I can, and slowly shape them into something that feels personal and new.

I have been experimenting with a small retro-inspired BASIC runtime called ORBIS and recently focused heavily on terminal rendering performance and fullscreen graphics.

Instead of using SDL or OpenGL, the renderer works directly inside modern terminals using ANSI truecolor escape sequences, Unicode halfblocks and software framebuffers. Initially I expected terminal graphics to be far too slow for realtime animation, but after implementing fullscreen streaming frame output and dirty-cell rendering the results became surprisingly smooth under GPU accelerated terminals like Kitty.

At the moment I have working demos for scrolling panoramas, snowfall simulation, classic fire effects, neon fireworks and simple sprite animation. One of the most interesting discoveries was how dramatically rendering performance changes depending on update strategy. Sparse scenes benefit heavily from dirty rendering while fullscreen scrolling performs much better when generating one giant contiguous frame stream instead of many small cursor updates.

The runtime itself is built around Cosmopolitan portability, so the same executable can run across Linux, Windows, macOS, x86_64 and ARM64 systems with very little platform-specific handling.

This originally started as a fun retro computing experiment, but modern terminals turned out to be much more capable for realtime graphics than I expected. Right now I am mostly focused on polishing the renderer, improving documentation and creating more demos before sharing public preview builds.

GAME NAME : VANRAN
ON STEAM

We’ve just released a new demo for VANRAN on Steam.

Back in February, a lot of players gave us incredibly valuable feedback, and we ended up rebuilding huge parts of the game because of it.

We heard there are many hardcore action RPG and soulslike players here, so we’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts and advice after trying the demo.

VANRAN originally started as a soulslike action game, but as we kept developing our own systems and ideas, it gradually evolved into something closer to an action RPG with its own identity.

We’re a small team of 14 developers, but we truly want to create a memorable and satisfying action RPG.

Working on the demo taught us how important player feedback can be for a small studio like ours. Your advice genuinely helps shape the game.

We want to build something really special together with the community.

Thank you for checking out VANRAN.

Back in 1994, I was 21 years old, coding on a 386 DX40 with a Sound Blaster 16 and 4MB of RAM.

I built Realtech Module Player — a DOS tracker module player, released at The Party 1994. If you were around in that era you might remember it. It played MOD, XM, S3M, and similar formats, and it was part of the same creative period when our group Realtech was making demos — including DX Project, which placed 3rd at Assembly 1995.

RMP ran for a few years. Then on Y2K eve, December 31st, 1999 — it died. Like a lot of things from that era.

Thirty years later, I decided to bring it back.

Using agentic AI tools, I restored a working Windows 11 port and a Watcom DOS build of the original. Here's a video of it running:

🎬 Watch: Realtech Module Player — Original DOS version remastered for

The original Pouët entry is here if anyone wants to dig into the history: 👉 Realtech Module Player v1.19 — pouët.net

This is just the beginning. A modern re-release is in development for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Windows 11 — with support for tracker modules (via libxmp), retro game music (via libgme: NSF, SPC, GBS, and more), and VGM/chip formats (via libvgm). More on that soon.

For now — here's to the 30th anniversary of a player that was built on 4 megabytes and a dream.

— Execom / Realtech

I've been experimenting with realtime terminal rendering inside Kitty and ended up with two completely different visual styles. One uses a high resolution hybrid Kitty graphics renderer with dirty cell updates and adaptive redraws, while the other uses low resolution Unicode halfblock rendering.

What surprised me is that the lower resolution version does not just feel like a technically worse version. It feels like a completely different artistic medium. The high resolution renderer feels cinematic and immersive while the lower resolution version feels much more stylized and retro.

Most of the work unexpectedly turned into solving rendering problems instead of drawing graphics. Things like terminal cell alignment, dirty tile rendering, image placement behavior, scaling artifacts and mixing Unicode rendering with Kitty graphics turned out to be far more complicated than I expected.

Right now I am experimenting with combining both approaches together. Using Kitty rendering for detailed static backgrounds and Unicode rendering for realtime effects like rain and overlays.

Now I am honestly unsure which direction is more interesting creatively. Pushing terminals toward high resolution realtime rendering or embracing the aesthetics and limitations of lower resolution text graphics.

Curious what the demoscene community thinks about this.

Added a rudimentary 3D vector gfx engine for my dual bitmap overlay to augment raycaster or other game genre when desired.
Is double buffered flicker free, raster flexible positioning with PETSCII hologram technology(tm)!

Norway is leading a multinational UNESCO ICH-02 nomination for the demoscene, with Germany confirmed as co-submitting State Party.

As part of the documentation of community participation and free, prior and informed consent, practitioners are invited to complete the consent form below.

Link: https://forms.gle/FzwVd7ovndev3VrP9