In my attempt to make one submission a day in this jam I was about done by lunchtime when I realised pico8 was in token mode, not character mode. When I switched it was over 900 - absolute nightmare.

No idea how to reduce it at this point in optimisation, so shelved it for re-evaluation tomorrow and started something simpler from scratch.

Am I just an idiot or has this happened to you?

Happened to me too. I was so surprised by the size of my code. Then I noticed I was looking at tokens, and found I had used over 800 characters. Luckily I had features I could remove and lots of scope for squeezing the size down.

I uploaded the result of my feature stripping this morning (https://itch.io/jam/tweettweetjam-9/rate/2699064) ultimately there just wasnt enough room for my asteroids clone to include bullets. Salvaged something fun from it though.