Nostalgia 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.