With Lifeforce we wanted to make a demo that has a progression and a cyclic narrative. It starts where Iconoclast, our Assembly 2005 demo, ended: we enter into the mind of the creator / avatar / muse (a small reference to Homer here) and descend into the beginning of the journey of life. The images of nature and the laughter o f children are the starting point. Like some other parts in this demo the happy and playful mood is interrupted by sorrowful events (knife slicing the rainbow). The sequence that follows (tree submerged in liquid, bubbles floating towards the surface) is the progression to maturity and the passage of time. The character tries to climb the mountain in vain and extends his arm to reach for the beating heart - the symbol of youth.The images that follow (statue of men reading the scribes, bells ringing in the distance) are a reference to religion, seemingly the last resort of some men in the dusk of their lives. The second part of the demo begins in the bathroom sequence. The man has died but left a message: “ZEI”, which means he/she/it is alive. A message of hope, maybe ? The black strips and octopuses represent the fear of death and guilt. The strips guide us through a series of surealistic images that overlap one another: images of living things that exist in the domain of the living (city, horse,elephant,clown). We wanted to create a feeling of anxiety before the revelation of the last scene in which we have drawn a full circle: The desert is revisited, only now, after innumerable years it is an ocean, deep and dark. The crescendo slowly builds to a nuclear blast that engulfs our world and memories. We too now sink down and contemplate our own mortal fate.

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.