obsidian is a WebGL powered demo released at the Euskal demo party by xpslv (Mr. doob + trace). I’m going to cheat slightly and insert a lot of the text from the readme below because it’s quite fascinating reading and easy to overlook if all you do is watch the demo and skip looking at the source code.
“This time I challenged myself to see if I could do a demo with just my ARM Chromebook. Not being able to “launch” ChromeOS with the –allow-file-access-from-files flag made things a bit harder. That means that I couldn’t use textures or models. Luckily three.js nowadays have a fair amount of primitives to play with.”
“It was also a great excuse to improve frame.js, which is a sequencer and editor I started back in November. So, initially I wasn’t really planning to do anything for Euskal. But just as I arrived I learnt that Navis was going to release so, even if I only had 2 days until the deadline, I decided to go for it.”
“Some months ago I found this great track by Om Unit and Lorn and I kept it on my folder of potential demo tunes. I decided to use that one because it was the shortest in the folder, even if I was scared of “wasting” it by doing a crappy demo.”
“The process was like with “Or so they say…” once again. I had no idea what the demo was going to look like. So I started building the first scene aiming to get something that matched the tune’s mood. Took a while but in 3 or 4 hours I had the first part – that’s 13 seconds done, 227 to go. Then, somehow, I came up with the idea of the always changing sphere that suited this rhythmic sound in the tune – probably influenced by the intro of Masaaki Yuasa’s Kaiba. The tune also felt like something was travelling, so I went with the classic idea of making it travel through a tunnel. The process continued for the whole day until I called it a day. I had 2 minutes filled (until the end of the title part) and 2 more to fill the next day, so that was encouraging.”
“Initially my plan was to do random scenes and just sync them with the music – like most of demos are. But I seemed unable to do that, once I finished a scene I had to find a good way to follow it. As if I was forced to tell a story. I struggled a bit more the next day with what to do when the spheres collided. Actually, the idea of the colliding spheres came the second day, so I spent a long while improving what I had and running out of time for the last 2 minutes. Anyway, again, after I had the collision I guessed the obvious thing would be doing some sort of explosion. But I couldn’t stretch that idea for too long. Luckily then the idea for the city (another classic) came up and I wondered if I could stretch that part for a whole minute. Turns out it worked pretty well with the tension that tune has at that point.”
“I did most of the work at the hotel because the party place has become a meme-con and is impossible to do anything there. I was expecting the deadline for demos to be around 5pm on Saturday so I went to finish the demo at the party place. The deadline was at 12pm and they were pretty strict about it and I got disqualified (spain is different).”
“I finished in time for the demoshow and I got to enjoy it on the big screen. So did the 6,000 at the party place (even if they have no idea what this is all about. I also proved myself that I could do a demo with that laptop and I couldn’t stop to be amazed how this little device had pretty much the same power the big computer I used to carry around for parties 10 years ago had.”
Run obsidian in your browser (WebGL obviously required) or here’s a video if your browser can’t cope. Those curious can download the source code from github.