May I throw some game suggestion that I got thinking whilst inspired by the jam?

As I won’t participate in the jam really, but as I was designing my own computing architecture, I figured that sharing this phonebook narrative game idea could spark some innovation into the space.

I don’t and won’t promote my actual content here, that would be for me to do onto the Itch community tab dedicated forums and my Tumblr blog to provide hyperlinks over. So this post is more of a brainstorm of ideas for whoever wants to emulate Nokia 3310 hardware feel and twist it within the jam’s contraints.

In a nutshell, it is heavily inspired by Zachtronics and some contraints from the Nokia 3310 device & hardware to make a turing-complete toy with a limited index of addresses to call over, and a ‘Turing Tarpit’-style gameplay with a focused story narrative attached, like with TIS-100 or Exapunks. Might not use the actual dumb-phone functions (I don’t talk of the additional buttons, but the literal audio factor of communicating with a user) but if possible I would.

I do have some narrative design, phonebook + instruction manual writeup to enact for such a concept on my end, but I feel like it would never fit the jam because of some other specifications I would deviate strongly from, like the colors I use, screen space for a decent experience, the ‘base word unit from bytes to tribbles’ + ‘edit the ~4 KiloWords total program memory of cells’ + ‘Zachtronics-y genre tropes’ details, and ofc all the analog audio phone-call emulation parts of the narrative.

But I am definitely encouraging the jammers, if it is allowed ofc, to at least attempt making a narrative yet systemic game around calling custom addressing phone numbers for the Nokia 3310 and its design space.

Anyway thanks and farewell.