Watch Encounter, by Agenda. Just 256 bytes of code, a set of characters shorter than this sentence, generates the exquisitely cinematic clip embedded below: a placid sea becomes increasingly choppy and menacing until a frightening anomaly reveals itself, grows, and finally devours reality. You can run it bare in your browser (Firefox is best) at this url, using the MicroW8 Assembly-based fantasy console.
At Hacker News, user skrebbel writes about its reception at the Outline Demoparty this weekend: "we were all blown away. The crowd went proper mad, hats off. Everybody was already super impressed when it was just sea waves, because they looked much better than one would expect in a 256b compo. And when the weird egg thing came and exploded, our minds did too."
I love that it has the mandatory color-grade applied to all contemporary science fiction. All this in 256 bytes and there was space left over for muted teal.
There's a "making of" video, embedded below. It's fascinating in it's own right, but no, it won't help.
Previously: A short film generated by only 256 bytes of code
