Any questions you may have post here and I will get back to you ASAP!
Yes and yes. Two different fonts are provided under the “Resources” page but so far that is it.
Awesome to hear! This is a great jam for a new dev. I am looking forward to playing your game!
I forgot about those engines! The game resolution must be 84x48 in landscape or portrait so if the engine cannot scale/work in that requirement it would not be allowed.
I can only speak in Game Maker terms but your camera should be 84x48/48x84. You can leave the viewport at the required resolution or scale it for players so they are not looking at a tiny game window.
If you want to work in a lower resolution as an artistic choice it would have to be scaled up to the required resolution.
I hope that makes sense and answers your questions!
I think really the question is whether we're allowed to do something along the lines of letterboxing a game down to 84x48. For example, here's a very simple "SuperChip" CHIP-8 program which logically runs at 128x64 pixels, but which fills the border with a solid matte. The light-colored region of the screen, where one would draw game graphics, is 84x48: http://johnearnest.github.io/Octo/index.html?key=aQPWzRRq
Octo can use any colors for its palette (there are 2-color and 4-color palette modes available, the former of which is suitable for this Jam), but I think PICO-8 is off the table because its palette cannot be altered to meet the jam requrements.
The example you posted would be allowed. As long as the player is only seeing 84x48 at a time. Thanks for clarifying as I am not familiar with these engines!
Nope! Your game does not have to run on a NOKIA 3310. We're just using the restrictions as a design space!
Take a look at these two examples from last year's jam. I think they both did the sound very well.
https://clonedeath.itch.io/sokoban-nokia-3310
https://machinescreen.itch.io/hwy3310
If I am understanding your P.S. correctly they do not have to "snap". You can see the pixels move relatively smoothly in this gameplay video Jannick provided for last year's jam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32PsXnU1070&feature=emb_title
I hope that helps let me know if you need any more clarification!
If your framework doesn't put you ahead of others using a full game engine it should be okay. Your core game should only be made in the time limit specified. Use your best judgement.
Alright, thanks for clarifying. I'll work on it now.
You can oversee it at my github if you want.
The Nokia 3310 display has a resolution of 84 * 48 px, but they are not square pixels.
Is it allowed to use a custom shader to use non-square pixels to match the real dimensions of a Nokia 3310?
In this example, one pixel is 3 by 4.
Compare that to using square pixels: 
is it 3by4 ratio exactly? iv been writing my engine and went with 7by9 pixel ratio that seems approximately alright to me.
also would it be alright to do ghosting and low fps?
if you wanna check out the html5 engine
Anything you want to do to try and make your game more accurate to the original Nokia 3310 would be allowed!
Interesting! I did not know this. This would be allowed as you're just trying to make it as accurate as possible. I would make sure you put a disclaimer on your game page explaining what you did so people don't think you're disobeying the resolution rules.
yes pretty much see that you have a working pipeline to draw stuff on screen, if your not to fermiliar with the engine your using try making a simple pong (or snake clone) to see everything is working just something to check the display functions, sound and inputs. little helper functions I would also still consider if there generic enugh like printing text, drawing shapes, or key rebinding and screen scale options. this would be the maximum amount you could do in my opinion.
This is a good answer! Your core game should be made from start to finish only in the allotted time. As long as you’re not doing more than someone starting fresh using a full game engine (game maker, unity) you should be fine. Like jeana says definitely take some time to familiarize yourself with whatever engine you’re using before the jam starts so you’re not going in blind! Good luck and feel free to ask as many questions as you need!
i think that you should follow the nokia 3310's limitations, you couldn´t use panning, volume envelopes or add filters or custom waveshapes, i also think you can't do pitch bends, you could play diferent notes, but couldn't bend them, and also you can't play more that one note at the same time. Hope this comment is helpfull :D
Teams are allowed or you can go solo. Just keep in mind that with the available prizes there is a limited amount of keys so if a team wins you will all have to decide how the prize is split. This was a small oversight from me. I realize it's not optimal but we're a little too close to start to change.
Its hard to get a specific number but if you're trying to make your game as accurate to the original as possible Jeana settled on 15 fps. Click here to see that post. Otherwise just stick with 30/60 fps.
I don't know the actual answer here, but you could make the game as normal in PICO-8 and change the colors manually for the HTML export that you submit to the jam here on itch (it's easy enough to change the color vales in the exported JS). And you can approximate the colors better than that using the extended secret palette (one of the secret colors is #125359, for example), although you obviously can't get them exact.
I just checked, it is indeed easy enough to just hack the JS output and swap the colors for the desired jam colors.
For pico-8 devs who are interested - after exporting to html, open the generated javascript file. The pico-8 color palette is stored as RGB values, comma separated, no spaces. If you want to replace RED (index 8) with another color, just search for "255,0,77" and then swap these with your new desired RGB.
Thanks!
https://github.com/1888games/Horace3310
Don't remember exactly how I did it, you'll need to set a custom view resolution of 840 x 480 in the Game tab. To be honest if I was doing it again I might do it a different way, but I'm probably doing this year's jam in something else.
If I am understanding correctly yes you can. Sounds like in the end you're basically just scaling it up. Scaling up is completely fine and I would recommend it so people aren't actually trying to play on 84x48 resolution on modern screens.
Yeah, also have to make sure the big 'pixels' only move in 1/84 steps. This sort of rules out physics engines because they will move everything on a granular level, if you move things yourself you can round to the nearest 'pixel'. In last year's game I stored the position at a precise level, but when it came to actually moving the object I rounded. Then you can get smooth acceleration that still snaps to pixels, rather than speed being clamped to 1, 2, 4, 8 pixels per frame.
Having written that you could use physics, just hide the 'real' object and show an object which takes the real object's position and rounds it before displaying.
Awesome thanks! Yeah im just scaling it up and working from there.
Yeah in testing out the implementation i had to find work arounds to keep everything snapped to the pixel grid and constrained down to the nokia's fps. I ended up turning every pixel into a 1x1 rectangle and the scaling methods in Löve2d seemed to handle it. For the fps i just gated any calls inside the update and draw functions to happen only on the specific frames.
Plus homebrew collision detection are so much easier when you're dealing with movements expresed in integers.
You can do either. You can go with an arrow keys/wasd for convenience or a big block of keys to simulate the actual nokia keyboard. I would recommend giving the option of either but depending on what 12 block of keys you choose it might be difficult to support. Keep in mind that if you choose to use the numpad exclusively you might be excluding people who don't have a keyboard with a numpad.
This was a rule carried over from last year and if I remember the controls for space impact and snake I found only used the keypad. The four buttons (C, select and arrow keys) were more for menu navigation/things outside the game. Ill look into it and update the rules for next year if I discover anything else.
Not a biggie, I was mostly just wondering if they were captured by the OS and not available for games on the old 3310 or something. Thanks!
