Embers (2012)
Speaking of procedural generation that doesn’t rely on infinite variation, the primary use of procgen in the demoscene is to save space.
The winner of the then-new 1 kilobyte category in Assembly Summer 2012, “Embers” fits into only 1024 bytes.
At that scale, the two programmers who created it basically had to use fractals, because they only had about 350 bytes to squeeze in the GLSL shader code for the visuals, once the framework code was in place. Fractals are common enough to be cliche in the demoscene, but they judged that the fairly-new mandelbox would be fresh enough to make an impact.
Slightly unusually, the demo is written for OSX, and it makes use of tricks like a custom, content-aware gzip compressor. The result is a compressed binary smaller than this blog post.
While demos could theoretically have infinite variation, that’s actually somewhat counter to the demoscene’s norms of reproducible technical virtuosity.Though there have been moves towards introducing interactivity (of which .kkrieger is probably the most well known outside the scene), variation is usually not a primary goal.
An interview with the programmers: http://www.creativeapplications.net/mac/embers-by-tda-1-kilobyte-to-rule-them-all/