Competitions

General Rules

In case of questions concerning these rules or the competitions at Evoke simply get in touch with us.

  • The competitor must be present at the party (except for the ANSI/ASCII and Pixel Graphics competition). In case of a group production, at least one member of the group must be present. Every attendee may contribute with a maximum of one entry for each compo.
  • The music composer is not allowed to be registered with any copyright society. This includes, but is not limited to, all member societies of BIEM. Please get in touch with us in case of doubts prior to taking part in a compo.
  • Entries must not have been released before and they must be handed in before each deadline.
  • The organizers have the right to cancel a compo if there aren't enough competitors.
  • There will be a preselection if there are too many entries for a compo (for details see below).
  • You have to agree that we'll spread your contribution (e.g. through scene.org or other sites).
  • You may submit a screenshot for your release.
  • The organizers reserve the right to make changes to the competition rules and to disqualify any entry which is not suitable for the compo for any reason. This includes anything violating german or international law.

Compo Machine

  • CPU: Core i7-7700K 4,2GHz
  • Mainboard: ASUS H270M-PLUS
  • RAM: 16GB RAM 2400MHz
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X Pascal with 3584 cores
  • Windows 10 64bit Creators Editiion with latest NVIDIA driver

We will have two identical machines. The compo machines are provided by the friendly guys from Revision. Thank you!

Executable

If you want your demo to be shown in full size you have to make sure it runs in 1920x1080 resolution. Best way to achieve this is to include a resolution and aspect selector in your demo/intro. You can also deliver different executables of your 4k/64k intro if you have filesize troubles.

PC Demo

  • Filesize limit: 256MB after unzipping.
  • Maximum running time: 10 minutes.
  • Flash animations are not allowed, please submit them to the Animation compo.

PC 64k-Intro

  • Filesize limit: 64k (65536 bytes)
  • Maximum running time: 10 minutes.

PC 4k-Intro

  • Filesize limit: 4096 bytes.
  • Maximum running time: 10 minutes.

Alternative Platforms

  • Every platform is allowed (e.g. game consoles, mobile devices, oldschool homecomputers etc.)
  • Bring your own hardware!
  • Pure animations are not allowed.
  • Maximum running time: 10 minutes.
  • Please try to deliver a video of your demonstration.
  • Please contact us if you provide a video signal other than DVI or composite. 
  • Please try to bring a SCART cable for your device, if possible!
  • We prefer showing entries from the real (your) hardware, but this is not always possible. Please come to the beamteam early to test this.

PC Platforms

Windows is currently the only PC platform "supported" by us. If you plan to release a Mac OS X or Linux entry, please contact us *before* the party to make sure we can play it somehow. Please consider entering a Windows port of your demo. If that is not possible, we cannot guarantee that your demo will be displayed in 16:9 ratio etc. - for any other platform (what we endorse really much), there is the Interactive competition.

Interactive

In this competition we want you to explore new types of artforms. Any application that involves human interaction to generate visual and/or audio feedback to the audience is allowed. We try to engage new platforms and we are open to any kind of submissions.

Get creative and experimental! We embrace any kind of input, for example:

  • Keyboard, mouse, gamepad
  • Wii controller
  • Kinect, PlayStation Eye
  • Trackpad

Examples of interactive applications:

  • Games
  • Interactive demos
  • Responsive/Narrating story-telling
  • Music disks
  • Experimental visualization of user input

Rules

  • Every platform is allowed.
  • Must not have been released before.
  • We endorse you to present it live in the competition.
  • A microphone will be provided for additional commenting.
  • Maximum running time: 10 minutes.

Please contact us if you need or bring special hardware other than our compo PC, especially if you provide a video signal other than DVI or Composite. We will show the usual output on the big screen and also the interaction on a second display. Executables will be released.

Graphics

Evoke will feature a big screen with a 16:9 aspect ratio and a maximum resolution of: 1920*1080*32bit. If above, your contribution will be scaled down. If your contribution is smaller than this resolution or has a different aspect ratio, there will be black borders around your graphic.

Animation

  • This is the compo for all animations or videos.
  • H264 codec recommended.
  • Maximum showing time: 10 minutes.
  • You should prepare your material in 16:9 screen ratio.

Pixel Graphics

You have to create an image which uses a limited palette.

  • Use ONLY the colors of the pico-8 palette
  • Be sure your image contains only these colors. Images with more or other colors will be disqualified!
  • You can choose the resolution, 16:9 aspect ratio is recommended.
  • You don't have to use all colors, we will show the actual number of colors used.
  • Final image must not have been released before.
  • GIF animation is allowed.
  • Maximum showtime per entry is 30 seconds.
  • There will be a preselection, where e.g. badly converted content will be disqualified.

Remote Entries: The Pixel Graphics compo is open to contributions of people who are not present at the party. Send your work to Pandur (tom (at) drastic [dot] net) until 15th of August 2018.

Freestyle Graphics

  • You can use every tool you want. Photos belong in this competition. Otherwise: "no rules".
  • All pictures will be shown with the latest version of IrfanView.
  • Please hand in pictures with a flawless compression like PNG to ensure highest quality.
  • If you can submit steps of the creation process, they will be shown.

One Screen ANSI/ASCII

  • IMPORTANT: this year's textmode compos will only show one screen height / 25 lines!
  • Maximum width: 80 characters / Maximum length: 25 lines.
  • Will be shown with PabloDraw in normal and VGA mode.
  • PabloDraw's built-in Topaz font will be used for displaying Amiga style ASCII.
  • iCE colours are not allowed.
  • Custom palettes are not allowed.
  • Ansimations are not allowed.
  • You are allowed to submit entries that were already released in packs and collections, but only if these were released in 2018, and only if you state the fact in the submission notes. The information whether your entry was already released in a pack or whether you have drawn it exclusively for Evoke will be shown on the big screen.
  • If there are enough entries, we will split the compo into PC ANSI/ASCII and Amiga ASCII.

Remote Entries: The ANSI/ASCII compo is open to contributions of people who are not present at the party. Send your work to Pandur (tom (at) drastic.net) or Dipswitch (dipswitch (at) kaoz.org) until 15 of August 2018.

Music

In case a compo attracts a big amount of entries, preselection will be done. For a detailed account on preselection and its practice at Evoke, see below.

MP3/OGG

  • Required format: OGG or MP3.
  • Maximum playing time: 3:30, longer songs will be faded out from 3:30 to 3:40.
  • Playback with current Winamp 5.x version.

Tracked Music - "Da Clone" Remix

This year, we decided to honour a PC demoscene classic: the soundtrack from Halcyon’s “Da Clone” (1995) – an example of particularly clever usage of just three samples. The compo is endorsed by the original composer, Croaker/Halcyon.

The original song (joikhu.s3m) is available for download here.

  • Supported formats: XM IT S3M MOD RNS XRNS
  • You are only allowed to use the original samples, no additional samples are allowed. You are not allowed to duplicate, cut or modify a sample via your tracker's sample editor, apart from setting a loop. All other sample modifications have to be done via tracker commands. The original order of samples in the sample list has to remain intact.
  • Usage of VST plugins is NOT allowed.
  • If you use Renoise, you are NOT allowed to use the internal effect and instrument devices. Also, you are allowed to use only one effect column at a time.
  • Maximum playing time: 3:30, longer songs will be faded out from 3:30 to 3:40.
  • Playback with current versions of OpenMPT (XM, S3M, IT), 8bitbubsy’s ProTracker (MOD), or Renoise (RNS, XRNS).

 

Compo Preselection

In compos which are potentially crammed (like the music compos), preselection is a necessary evil. Of course it is understandable that every participant wants to present his song over the party's PA to the audience. Yet it is not much of a benefit if the audience is not longer receptive after half of the compo - assuming that all entered songs get played. Evoke's MP3/OGG compo attracts between 30 and 50 entries each year, and playing all of them would not only exhaust the audience, but also make our timetable explode (more than usual anyways ;-) ).

So, preselection is inevitable. Yet, we at Evoke want to make this process as transparent and fair as possible, so that your entries get an equal chance. We believe that as a musician who invests hard work into a song, you deserve to have detailed insight into the preselection mechanism.

The following preselection model is used at Evoke for music compos with over 15-16 entries (such as the MP3/OGG compo):

  • Four people get chosen shortly before the party to be the preselection team. The nomination follows the principle of having a preselection team consisting of individuals with very contrary musical tastes, so that ideally no style of music gets discriminated. Also, the team members have different "professional" approaches to music: ideally there should be three musicians (two scene musicians and one "reallife" musician) and one "consumer". The names of the preselection team members are not being disclosed to the public to protect them against harrassment from disappointed musicians, yet participants can be assured that the preselection team is composed with the aim to give your music the most weighted judgement.
  • After the deadline for submission is elapsed, the preselection team gets summoned to listen through the entries in a separate room. Without communicating with each other and without knowing who composed the songs, they write down a value between 1 (worst) and 5 (best) for each song they listen to. The preselection team members are requested to value the songs not only according to their personal musical taste, but also judging the composer's productions skills and the grade of uniqueness/innovation.
  • After the listening session, the music compo head collects the votes and counts the points for each entry. The 15-16 songs which collected the highest amount of points are thus chosen to be played to the audience.
  • Unlike some other demoparties, we will NOT spread your entry if it didn't pass the preselection, so it is not counted as "released" and thus can be entered at any other party. So your hard work was not in vain, even if your entry didn't get played to the audience.