Sincerely, I was a bit over-focused on the "qualifiers" and forgot that "theme" also exists. However, I'm not certain whether I would have done much different even with conscious knowledge that theme implementation is slightly preferred.
Both Cai and Shiroiii did excellent work composing everything from scratch within two weeks. Neither of them were particularly familiar with XM authoring tools prior to the jam, and learned during the jam. Cai used a FastTracker 2 clone, and Shiroiii used MilkyTracker.
Both composers mentioned that the most difficult part of their work was in creating the instruments. All instrument sounds were created during the jam as well. A reflection of an AICA hardware limitation, I set a restriction that sample data must be "less than or equal to 65535 bytes in length per sample". This in turn (as a reflection of constraint difficulty) influenced both composers to design mostly non-looping and/or "percussive" instruments, because creating perfect loops of "real" instruments both with a small number of samples and without specialized AICA-specific "DAW" tooling is quite difficult.
