Monolith

I've been meaning to add this for a while, since it's release predates this blog and I thought that the 10th anniversary of the release might be a good time!

Back in 2004, I was a member of a C64 group called 'FunkScientist Productions' with MTR1975.  Monolith was the third (and final) release of this group.

This one-file demo had a gestation period of at least a year as far as I remember, with date stamps on some of my archived pre-release builds dating to August 2003.  Work was held up on the 'Fletch' game to work on this demo and unfortunately the game was never resumed.

From memory, the sprites were pixelled in Spr-Eddi V1.3, the mountains and logo in Advanced Art Studio and the charset font in Ultrafont.

The demo can be downloaded from CSDb here...

However, a direct download here will also bag you around 30 odd pre-release builds showing the demo from it's very early stages, the graphics in their original formats and the source code.  The pre-release builds are quite interesting to run because they feature early versions of MTR1975's excellent tune that accompanied the demo.

Sabbat

This Halloween, Arkanix Labs, in conjunction with Retro64, has released a C64 demo called 'Sabbat' which features my pixels and one of two of my first SID tunes to ever feature in a C64 demo.  The demo is subtitled 'Retroween II' as it is a follow up to an older demo called 'Retroween'.

In the image above, all of the bitmaps, charsets and sprites were pixelled by me, other than the pumpkin/knife bitmap which was pixelled by Warlock.

The clown bitmap, based on 'Pennywise' from the 1990 TV mini-series 'It' was actually started back around 1999 (along with my Matrix Loader bitmap) and has been pixelled on and off since then, the main issue being the hair which seemed to cause no end of problems for no apparent reason. It was started in Advanced Art Studio and ended up being completed in Project One.  All other bitmaps were pixelled in Project One.

The hires silhouette image was also pixelled in Project One, but converted into chars for the demo by Moloch.  The sprites were pixelled in SpritePad V1.7, with the zombie sprite already making an appearance in my SEUCK compo entry 'Zombie Brain Eaters' earlier this year.  The charset font in the scrolling message was pixelled in Ultrafont.

After searching through the HVSC for a decent, ghoulish sounding SID tune, I decided to pluck up the courage and compose something myself in Goattracker.  Not bad for a first effort and it fits the demo quite well, but there is soooo much learning to do with the SID chip, things can only improve.

The demo can be downloaded from it's CSDb page here...

However, by downloading directly from this blog, you can also get the raw image files in Koala format, the sprites in SpritePad format and the music in Goattracker format.  Download a zip file with all this here...