Studio Besus Demo Disc

BesusDemo01Nostalgia is something all too common for me and in my most recent bout of it, Playstation demo discs attacked. Going through many of my older ones, I yearned for the exciting days of getting a new one. I discovered countless games I otherwise never would have thanks to them; Ape Escape, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and Bloody Roar just to name a few. With broadband internet as common as it is and demos becoming less and less common for games, they are certainly a dying (already dead?) breed. I wanted to change that, or at the very least, revisit my nostalgia.

To do so, I decided to use my engine of choice: Unity. Thanks to the System.Diagnostics namespace, I am able to open external executables from the “launcher” using: Process.Start(path to exe). But before launching the demo, I open a brief description of the game and give the user the chance to back out or start it. Upon doing so, I pause the music and bring up a new UI message to indicate a demo has been launched. To keep the “optical disc” feel of the Playstation demo discs, I make extensive use of Movie Textures to showcase the currently selected item as well as to play a full screen movie (but this is done an a separate canvas).

Overall I am very satisfied with the feel of it all and even designed it so demo configurations, videos, descriptions, and titles can easily be swapped out for other games and/or specific game studio collections.

Download the Studio Besus Demo Collection here!