Here post any questions you have
Hey! Excited for the jam! I attended a game jam similar to this. There were lots of technical questions asked by attendees. Maybe you can check out there and answer some questions that apply to this jam as well.
That jam was called 4MB Jam: https://itch.io/jam/4mb
And please don't make the same mistake about the results. 1st place won with two 5 star ratings
I think he is asking if a Pico-8 distributable cartridge (requires Pico-8 runtime) is suitable. In the same way an Atari game was limited by cartridge size but didn't need to worry about libraries that were built into the hardware Pico-8 (software) simulates a fantasy game platforms hardware and the distributions can be PNG files which look like cartridges. Its a cool system. So the question for you is if the game libraries that render the game need to be included in the floppy as is the case with traditional oldschool Dos games etc... or if a retro platform cartridge equivalent which only includes game assets, data and code qualifies.
Given the rules don't state it has to run as a Windows Executable etc... it seems to open this up as a possibility.
I have two questions:
First, does the game have to be for a specific system?
I would want to know if my game needs to be able to run on machines that have floppy disk drives (for example, old DOS computers or Commodores) or my game can be able to run only on Linux (or only on Windows), and no other platform.
Second, I can’t understand the phrase “No third party media” in the rules;
If no third-party media at all can be used (including compilers, OSs, etc.), then I would have to write my game directly in machine language and would have to write everything from scratch, and it would take me over a month to get even a basic platformer.
There are a lot of different meanings to this phrase, and I would kindly ask you to rephrase it. Thanks.
Can I use non-game-specific code that I’ve already written? While I was making one of my unreleased games, I made a non-game-specific file containing classes and functions for creating vectors and other useful things; just utilities that all the games I make share.
If you want to know the full list of utilities in this file (excluding ones I might add in the future), here’s a list:
I can also show the code if you want.