Hi Riley! This is a tricky question to answer, since when we talk about game engines like PICO-8 and TIC-80, they're running a huge amount of code behind the scenes as well. For instance, calling print("Hello World") in PICO-8 is technically 20 characters, but there's a ton of engine code behind the scenes making it possible for the command to actually do anything! But if we counted engine code toward the count, well, this jam wouldn't exist!
If I had to take a hard line on it, I'd say that if you have to write the code to make the game work, it counts toward your character count. Anything that your engine's built-in functions handle behind-the-scenes doesn't count toward the total. Does that make sense?
TweetTweetJam is a really chill jam, so we're not going to disqualify you or anything for making your own choices. But the point of the jam is to scale back and make your game code fit into two tweets. If you can't copy and paste your game code into two tweets (560 chars), then it's not technically within the scope of the jam. Hopefully this helps!