Fewer competitions, more room for discussion

In the spirit of accessibility and fostering learning, we will host fewer competitions, and instead provide a forum to shed light on their making, inspiration, tools and makers afterwards. Bring your best game, and share your tips and tricks afterwards - or bring your first entry, and tell us what inspired you, how you selected your tool and your way to it. After every compo, we will invite all participants to a laid-back roundtable with the respective compo organiser for a drink, for people to ask questions or listen to your side.

And yes, there will still be voting, as well as prizes.

General Rules:

Remote-entries are allowed for all compos, but will disable you from taking part in the discussions afterwards (so please come!) Only original work is allowed in our competitions, so you cannot use protected content. Any copyright violation charges will be passed on to the submitter of the production.

This also means that you are unable to release images made with derivate-generating ("AI") tools like Midjourney, as they are non-attributable and are by current understanding not original.

All entries must be exclusively released for the first time at MountainBytes, and must be handed in before the deadline (as per timetable).

By taking part in a competition, you are agreeing that we’ll spread your contribution (e.g. through scene.org or other sites). We recommend a brief licensing info in your .nfo- or README-file. The license aligning with demoscene-practice the most is probably CC BY-SA 4.0, so we would recommend that one. But you are of course free to make your own decision.

Please submit a screenshot for your release, and .zip your entry before submission.

Please list all tools you used in the slide to be presented to the audience. Like this, you help newcomers as well as our mentors to find and try out tools for their own productions. And it gives you bragging rights in case you handmade everything from scratch.

We reserve the right to disqualify entries, make changes or cancel competitions for any reason.

PC Realtime

High-end PC demos allow for the widest range of artistic freedom, for breathtaking graphics in only a few kilobytes. Join us and sway the audience to up their game in composition, artistic expression… or of course self-limitation and the crunching of code, to wow the audience what can be done in just a few kilobytes!

Max length: 8 minutes incl. load time
Platform: PC running any current stable windows version. Contact us in advance if your entry requires a different OS / platform.
Maximum resolution: 1920x1080, preferably at 60 Hz.
The entry has to be delivered as single .zip file included all necessary runtime libraries. Any engines or libraries used will be made publicly available and thus require a license permitting to do so.
Expect standard DirectX / .net runtime installed, do not expect VC runtime, XBox SDK or other 3rd-party libraries installed
Browser entries will be shown using latest Chrome or Firefox. Do not expect plugins including Flash, Java or PDF. Entries must be able to run from local file system

We will run the PC Realtime entries on a machine with the following specs:

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X
64GByte RAM
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090

Oldskool and Alternative Platforms Realtime

At its core, the love for and limitations on “oldschool” devices has always been at the heart of the demoscene. From the C64 to Amigaaaaaah, or exotic devices that people might not even have heard about - compete in this compo not just to show off your skill, but also the specialty and peculiarness that encourages you to produce demos for them, and tell us about it!

Max length: 8 minutes incl. load time
Available hardware:
- Commodore 64 - U1541-II , Action Replay attached (No REU no 2SID demos)
- Amiga (A500, 512kB Chip and 512 kB Slow Mem)
For C64 : Please state which SID chip to use (6581/8580). This information will be displayed on the info slides for your production.
VIC-20, Atari (ST), ZX Spectrum and other platforms: Please get in contact with us before the party, either via info@mountainbytes.ch or via our discord server so we can check if we can provide a suitable machine or capturing equipment. When in doubt: Bring your own device and videocapture. :)

Combined Graphics

Whether you are into Pixelart, Hand-drawn, 4k Graphics, 3D Models… this is your place! Show off your artwork, and discuss with us afterwards the pleasures of your trade, where you get inspiration and introduce guests to the tools you use.

Entries will be shown at maximum resolution 1920x1080 pixels. Larger images will be scaled down, smaller images may be shown at double/triple size without interpolation to preserve pixel clear display

Include up to four working stages for non-procedural graphics
Preferred format for submission is PNG. In case of graphics entries for non-pc platforms and executable graphics, please also submit a version of your entry as a PNG image file (for reference)
AI-generated artwork is not permitted.
Maximum rendering time for executable entries: 30 seconds

Combined Music

Be it Trackers, DAWs or even recorded live-music: the sky's the limit! Compose a song to be played on the Lorzensaal’s amazing sound system (usually optimised for anything from Swan’s Lake to full orchestra experiences), and afterwards use the chance to discuss styles, your approach, favourite tools and composing tricks with us!

Maximum playing length is: 3:30 min
Entries may not loop and have to end with silence
Executable Music: Part of the submission must be a .wav writer and instructions on how to use it; Maximum file size of the entry itself is 32768 bytes. The .wav writer and additional information do not count into this size limit; Maximum pre-calculation time (in case your player needs it) is 30 seconds.
Tracked Music: Allowed file formats: .mod, .s3m, .xm, .it; Please specify which XMPlay playback settings to use for your entry.
Streamed Music: Allowed file formats: mp3, ogg, opus at a bitrate of 192kbps or higher; Please complete ID3 tag or OGG file info as with as much detail as possible.