The end result proves to be a lot more melodic and sentimental than our previous tracks, more coherent as a whole and with a tighter beat and emotional synch. We did not include traditional progressive rock elements such as variating time signatures and syncopated rhythms and riffs this time as we felt that the flow of the demo called for a more “swimmy” (as we call it) soundtrack-ish approach. As with the visual part, the song explores the circle of life from birth to death,even if through dramatic circumstances reminding everyone, as per the title, that they are mortal. As the demo (and life) closes to the end, the sound gets rougher and more agressive, portraying the multiplying aspects in a person’s life until his lifeline is cut short , perhaps before its time. The dance segue, seemingly detached from the whole, is a friendly nod to those who understand that life should not be taken too seriously all of the time.

Lifeforce, like all ASD demos, is almost completely hand made; which means that apart from some static models and textures all model animation, particle effects, post processing, camera paths, synchronizations and everything else that makes this demo has been hard-coded. We believe that it is impossible to deliver a demo of the complexity of lifeforce by using an available demoscripting engine and putting in less work than hard-coding it the way we did in the first place. The code in Lifeforce is based on a very minimalistic 3D engine (a combination of all first 20 or so NeHe tutorials, for example, is a superset of our 3D engine) and heavy use of image processing and shaders.

The demo was written exclusively on an Athlon 3000XP with a geforce FX 5600 ultra.