BEHELiT debuts at Flash Party 2024
- Madbit
- Nov 28
- 3 min read
Yes, I know. I'm absolutely terrible at writing regular articles on this blog . But better late than never, I suppose. And I say that because it took me so long to write this summary of BEHELiT's presentation at Flash Party 2024 that it's going to end up being accompanied by another one about Flash Party 2025.
But let's start from the beginning. As I've mentioned elsewhere, my return to the demoscene was thanks to BEHELiT , a demo group I founded with Row and Toshi in mid-2023. After that year's Flash Party, we got together to plan our debut. Row started developing Vexel™, a game engine made in Kotlin that we would also use in our demos, and Toshi began creating the boilerplate we would use for our 4kb intros.
Flash Party 2024
Starting with this edition, Flash Party moved to a new venue called Tacheles , located in the center of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires . The event format remained the same as in the previous edition (see Flash Party 2023 Report - 25th Anniversary ), but with performances by Necrologic + Morgana Autumn , Milagro de Catamarca + Galgo con Piloto , L4t3r4l , and Dan Chelger.
Row and I traveled from Montevideo again to represent BEHELiT in person. For this edition, we contributed 5 productions across 4 different competitions.
Man in the vox (PC demo / Streaming music)
After nearly a year of research and development by Row, Vexel™ had its maiden voyage with " Man in the Vox ." This PC demo shows a little man made of voxels living in a cube with his cat while coding demos. The engine features global illumination, ray tracing, a simple editor, and animated voxels (imported from Magica Voxel using our own tool ). Once it was sufficiently developed, we began production of the demo itself, which took about a month and inaugurated our lore of constantly pushing deadlines. The effort paid off: both the demo and its soundtrack took first place in their respective competitions.
Teenage Mutant Capybaras (Text art)
Just like in 2023, I participated in the text art competition with an ANSI font size of 218 lines and 80 columns. Continuing with the theme of animals doing human things, this piece depicts a supposed Argentinian equivalent of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which, of course, consists of four ninja capybaras ready to attack some part of Nordelta. As you probably remember, I'm not an illustrator, so the process began with creating some reference images in Midjourney, which I then combined into a composition using Photoshop. From there, the rest was done entirely by hand in Moebius over approximately two weeks, and it ended up winning first place in the competition. Below is a video documenting the entire drawing process from the beginning.
ISS and ICS (4kb intros)
Almost literally on the deadline, and after finishing Man in the Vox, Row teamed up with Toshi to try and complete a 4kb intro in the few hours they had left. Surprisingly, they didn't make one, but TWO. Toshi wrote a lengthy article explaining the development process step by step. I recommend reading it if you're interested in this kind of technical stuff.
When I saw that the intro was working, I got to work and in a few hours I had composed the music. This song, "Nano," was my first production with Sointu Tracker and would later inspire an extended version. The interesting thing is that the file generated by the tracker contains about two minutes of music in just 600 bytes. Yes, bytes.
Finally, ISS won the 4kb intro competition, despite an excellent second place entry made in 172 bytes .
ICS, on the other hand, was more of a troll entry that we presented for the sake of it, and obviously, and to no one's surprise, it didn't get very far.
Conclusion
2024 was a super intense year for BEHELiT. Vexel™ debuted, we learned to work as a team, we presented our first productions, and we took the first steps to establish a name for ourselves in the demoscene.
But above all, we had a lot of fun doing it.
As a bonus, here are the results of each competition, the recording of the full stream , and a review of Flash Party 2024 by Psenough of Demoscene Report that covers all categories and most of the entries.
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