Norwegian Kindness? Is that a joke?

Yes, it is.

But it’s also an AGA/68060 demo which was released at Datastorm 2011, where it won the Amiga demo competition.
Although the demo group Spaceballs hasn’t been completely dead in recent years, NK is still somewhat of a “comeback demo” as it’s our first production to contain new effects since around 2004 (rather than rehashed code from yesteryear mixed with blurred video borrowed from the internet). The ideas behind the different effects were thought out between 2005 and 2010, but the majority of the actual code (except for basic frameworks and the infamous ‘Texture Mapper from 1999’) was developed between September ’10 and February ’11.  Most of the effects were implemented in September and October (with testing and optimization cycles relying heavily on WinUAE, irc and email due to the lack of an actual Amiga). The actual “linking” and demomaking took place during one intense week right before Kindergarden (where we were unable to finish the demo) and 1.5 week before/during Datastorm.
As always the demo ended up as something quite different than what we originally planned, but in the end I’m fairly happy with it as an in-you-face effect show. The fact that we beat Ephidrena, the uncrowned kings of subtle design touches on Amiga (you won’t notice, but they know it’s there!), shows that good old-fashioned “flash the screen and keep hitting them with new effects”-design ™ still works with the retro-geeks of today.

The next post  deal with the colour gradient trick used in NK (and in the Eph/Kvg/RNO demo from Datastorm), before we get into some of the more effect-specific code later on.