Demoparty 2020

We heard you like parties, so we made a party inside a bigger party.

JANUARY 2-5 2020 • GAYLORD NATIONAL RESORT • NATIONAL HARBOR, MD

What?

What is MAGFest?

It's a party. BIG party.

Short for "Music And Gaming Festival", MAGFest is a four day-long event dedicated to the appreciation of video game music, gaming of all types, and the gaming community.

The event runs 24 hours a day, and offers consoles, arcades, tabletop, LAN, live video game cover bands, chiptunes, vendors, guest speakers, and much much more.

Never heard of MAGFest? Learn more here.

What is Demoscene?

It's a community. Cool one!

The demoscene is an international computer art subculture focused on producing demos: self-contained, sometimes extremely small, computer programs that produce audio-visual presentations.

The purpose of a demo is to show off programming, visual art, and musical skills. Demos and other demoscene productions are shared at festivals known as demoparties, voted on by those who attend, and released online.

What is a demoparty?

It's a party. With Demos!

A demoparty is an event that gathers demosceners and other computer enthusiasts to partake in competitions called Compos.

A typical demoparty is a non-stop event spanning a weekend, providing the visitors a lot of time to socialize. The competing works, at least those in the most important competitions, are usually shown at night, using a video projector and loudspeakers.

Why?

Why MAGFest Demoparty?

Because MAGFest and Demoscene play really well.

Demoscene and demoparties, while present in the US, remained so far mostly a european phenomenon. One of the important factors, which makes integration of the demosceners in US difficult, is that demoparties here don't run 24h/day for 3 days. MAGFest does! Moreover, it offers a tons of other attractions: computer museum, gigs, discussion panels, video-game competitions, jam sessions, cosplays — you name it!

MAGFest is also full of young, talented people. In 2017, we started with just a presentation panel on the Demoscene; in 2018, Maq/Floppy run a workshop on shader programming, followed by two shader competitions, where several people participated in a demoscene competition for the first time in their lives! In 2019 we organized a fully-fledged demoparty at MAGFest! Thanks to your awesome support, we had 30+ entries submitted by participants both locally and remotely. We believe we can attract even more demosceners this year. And we count on YOU!

Party!

General rules

Not just Dos and Don'ts

We encourage you to include the MAGFest 2020 theme in your prod. The best and most clever uses will be rewarded with a sur-prize!

Remote entries are allowed, see “How to submit your entry”.

Remember: the primary purpose of MAGFest Demoparty is for the attendees to have fun. Thus, all the rules present at the MAGFest's Code of conduct apply at the demoparty as well! No exceptions.

Competition rules

Easy peasy.

No copy – be original! Only new entries, not submitted anywhere else (this includes making them public / available on the Internet).

We reserve the right to reject / remove any entries which do not follow the rules or are not demoscene related.

In case of productions for oldschool platforms, we will make every effort to run it on real hardware, but we reserve the right to use an emulator.

If your production violates any US or international law, is considered offensive or inappropriate, we can disqualify it or exclude it from post-party submission to demoscene archives.

Categories

We have four. Maybe more.

You can submit your entries in the following categories (competitions):

  • demo / intro compo
  • music
  • graphics
  • wild / animation

We will be flexible with compos if they are very popular (separating different kinds of music tracker formats if needed, etc.), all to make the competitions more exciting. As this is a multiplatform party, any demoscene hardware is welcome.

How to submit your entry

Entries at the party should be physically submitted to the Compo Team (pendrive, USB HDD, CD, floppy, punched tape…) before the deadline.

Remote entries are allowed but you will not receive the statue as we are not going to send it via post. In case of a remote submission, please email us an attachment or a link to a cloud service of your choice.

The deadline for remote entries is January 3th 2019.

Only compressed archives (zip / 7zip) with the following naming pattern: componame_nick_title / group_title.zip (newschoolgfx_george_landscape.zip). Please include an info file with details in the archive. If your file is bigger than 5 MB, we suggest to use Dropbox / Google Drive / iCloud / …

Non-demo competitions

Graphics

Modern and oldschool art

Freestyle GFX: pictures made with any technique. Any resolution (our beamer is 1920x1080 max). 3D renders, shopped pictures and all which does not qualify for the Oldschool GFX category. Popular file format (CompoView will be used for displaying). Please submit work stages!

Oldschool GFX: graphic art for any platform. Resolution: 320 x 256 max, 256 colours max. Please submit work stages. In case of Atari / C-64 / ZX Spectrum etc. entries please submit an appropriate executable file (*.xex, *.prg, *.d64, *.tap, etc.).

Music

Chip, tracked or streaming.

Max playtime — 4 minutes (entries can be longer but only the initial 4 minutes will be played at the party).

If you want to submit entry in other format than MP3, please contact us beforehand.

To make the competition more fair, we will split entries into Chip, Tracked and Streaming music competitions, depending on in which format you choose to submit (MP3, MOD, SID, ...). In case of non-MP3 music entries, please also provide the MP3 version of your track (or bring your own hardware to play it!)

Animation / Wild

Wild thing! You make my…

The most unhampered competition category. Unleash your creativity, release the Kraken!

All entries which cannot be qualified for other competitions: films, animations, exotic platforms, music discs, slideshows, live performances etc.

All entries should be provided in one of popular video formats (AVI/MP4, we'll use VLC to play them) or an executable.

Demo competitions

Executable competitions

The main categories we all love the most.

Intro (256B / 1 KB / 4 KB / 64 KB)

Executable productions with size limit.

  • Maximum file size is (256B / 1024B / 4096B / 65536B) — depending on the intro category
  • Separate categories for different platforms / file sizes if a category is popular (at least 3 entries)
  • Only executables
  • If case of oldschool platforms, please bring your own hardware or at least contact us beforehand and provide also a video-capture of your entry running from a real hardware.
  • In the worst case, we'll run it from an emulator.

Demo

Executables with file sizes over 64 KB.

  • Separate categories for different platforms if a category is popular (at least 3 entries).
  • All exotic (Direct3D, etc.) libraries should be provided in the same archive.
  • If case of oldschool platforms, please bring your own hardware or at least contact us beforehand and provide also a video-capture of your entry running from a real hardware.
  • In the worst case, we'll run it from an emulator.
Compo machine specification:

i7 7700K quad-core CPU at 4.2GHz, 2 NVIDIA GTX TITAN X Pascal GPUs (12GB VRAM per GPU), 32GB DDR4 3866 RAM, Windows 10 x64 or Ubuntu Linux.

Workshops

Music Creation for Older Generation Consoles

We'll show you how to turn your SNES into ultimate banger machine ◖(●。●)◗

  • Beginner and Advanced level
  • Talk about what demoscene / retro music is about
  • We will show you how to use trackers and other weird musical software
  • We will go too far into the technical aspects of the consoles ;)
  • Bring your laptop and compose live with us!