I’m new to TIC-80 (and jams and Itch…), but it looks to me like the TIC-80 font doesn’t even include symbols that aren’t on a standard US keyboard.
I used a * and a circle to get a spiky coronavirus-looking enemy. And then a circle and line for the player’s “cell” and turret.
I toyed with trying to either poke in sprites from code or memcopy from the screen to a sprite after drawing from code. It’s doable but takes up probably too many characters for this challenge. On the other hand, it is a challenge….
But yeah it looks like Pico-8 has several advantages for a “tiny code” challenge over TIC-80. Pay to win! Pay to win! (Just kidding!)
font ref:
https://itch.io/t/80843/font-availability#post-163418
https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1388526/tic-80-wide-font