Compression means everything here, so why not compress your code?

the front page has tons of tools and docs telling you how to, but if you dont want to read an article, ive got you covered!

COMPRESSION DO's And DONT's:

DO write your code uncompressed and save it as a backup before starting compression

DONT overwrite your old carts after compressing something. you might lose it.

DO look at your compressed bytes every now and then

DONT worry about compression until your cart is done and WORKING.

COMPRESSION HOW-TO:

1: compression in pico 8 is very simple! when saving a .p8.png, it compresses it. obviously. it does this by looking at your code, checking for repeating functions or strings, and saved repeats in the same "space". basically, if you have "function" 3 times in your code, it will only take up one "function" worth of compressed bytes.

to compress your carts, follow these 5 steps:

1: Use GOTO instead of certain "_" callbacks (in democarts/short carts). for example, if you are writing a short DEMOCART (not a game), where you are calling one global callback every frame, for example: "function _draw() pset(64,64,1) end" you can replace that with "::d:: pset(64,64,1) goto d". this saves a lot of space in democarts and very small carts that just loop in one callback

2: Remove any unnecessary line breaks (the thing that appears when you press "Enter"). this saves 1 char and frees up some bytes, at the cost of readability.

3: Shorten variable names. It always helps to shorten long variable names to save space. you could change "playerx" to "px" or change "playerwidth" to just "pw", or anything like that.

4: Dont use special chars. You know, the ones that appear when you Shift+click a keyboard key. These can use upwards of 2 bytes! that doesnt sound like a lot, but it adds up.

5: Combine functions. If you have multiple functions that do almost the same thing, write a new function combining the two, and if they do different things, make the new one return a different value depending on the input values.

By following these compression tactics, as well as ones found in the links on the front page of this jam, (which you should totally read btw) you can compress (almost) any cart into 1KB! (As long as you arent compressing some sort of wacky giga game that uses all 32kb)

Thanks for reading my guide! make sure to read the other ones too, because i am not an expert! i am just summarizing what the other guides say. Happy compressing!