Stercoraphasia
This demo was our second release as part of Excess.
Almost all the graphics were my own work, except for the "XS" logo on the first page. There are a lot of fancy tricks to perform smooth colour gradients, involving mixing multiple single-colour sprites (i.e. 256) in front of each other; nowadays it's hard to appreciate this, but it was reasonably clever for the time -- this is a technical demonstration after all!
If you move the joystick, the first-person-perspective accelerating starfield behind the "XS" will move as if you were flying in that direction.
The two sprites in front of the second scrolling starfield at bottom are performing a 2-level "sinus" -- a Lissajous curve -- where two Lissajous figures are imposed on one another to form a more complex pattern.
The music is by Rob Hubbard, ripped (by me) from "Delta".
Hit 'space' to enter the main part of the demo -- a sprite-sinus editor.
This has a set of 8 sprites dancing around the screen in another "sinus" formation; these ones use a nifty psychedelic colour scheme, and use various techniques to provide a 3-D look, with sprites at the top being much smaller than sprites at the bottom. There's also what I called a "sprite priority shuffler"; in other words, an attempt to give a 3-D look to the sinus, by ordering the "far away" sprites to appear "behind" the "nearer" sprites. Sounds pretty obvious, but I make reference in the scroller to Armalyte not doing this correctly.
There's a block of text at the top detailing the parameters, and a cursor which can be moved about with a joystick to change those parameters to provide interesting effects in the sinus.
The scrolling text is by myself and Exocet; when I originally wrote this, we were still "TNT" -- Thundertronix -- our original demo group. We joined Excess just before this demo, it seems.
The music is good -- it's "Dominator" by Matt Gray.
This isn't a great demo, to be honest -- more of a functional utility than anything else. In fact, it's a re-release of the "TNT Sinus Editor", with an Excess intro, when we joined Excess. I think it was my first demo, but I'm not sure.