Sumitori Dreams
The realm of extreme optimisation and demo-scene coding is an exotic place - with its capital in Finland (although possibly now in California now that Will Wright played pied-piper), and its results often seem to defy any sense of appropriate scale. My only attempt was a 5k flash game called minimalemmings years back - great fun to do but hardly rocket science. Since the era of procedural generation, programmable graphics cards and ubiquitous 3D, the plasma fields and chrome text have progressed to hardcore dynamics and ultra-compressed scenes and games comparable to production level graphics (such as the produkkt# kregier).
One of the latest is Sumitori Dreams, by Peter Sotesz . The graphics maybe be extremely basic but the amount that is packed in is quite absurd (its only 87k). Not only does it include rigid body physics, destructible bodies (love the way it feels to smash up the blocks), but also self-righting bipeds (as seen in Sony’s QRIO project). Mr Sotesz is clearly a very talented individual.
As a game, its fun to play with, but it does seem like the idea definitely came after the technology. As a playspace/sandbox its ace - to play the hidden mode, destroy the wall by firing through the right most gap in the bars.
Via fun-motion.
(For a more recent graphics-focussed demo - check out farbrausch’s 177kb Debris)
