(Note: some technical stuff below, I don’t know if you’re a PICO-8 programmer or just using it from the player side, but I put them in case you’re interested)
Ah, an enthusiast!
Let’s see… The biggest issue is the token limit. The most direct way to cut that is to remove all the backgrounds and foregrounds… I can try, but I’m fearing for the visuals.
The second issue is the “fast reload” patch. Unlike the token limit, it will not prevent you from running the game, but the game will freeze for up to 1s every time you change region (128x32 tiles). A true fix would be to store all the regions in Lua tables, and copy them myself instead of relying on PICO-8 reload. I believe it would be faster, not because of the implementation (Lua iteration may be slower than the engine’s C code even adding I/O operations).
An alternative could be to make a special reduced version of the level for vanilla PICO-8. This would fix the complex background code and the region loading issue (Bonevolt did it on Sonic 2.5 so I know it can be done, with the slight difference that my OOP code tends to be bigger).
For better results and in the spirit of PICO-8 I’d go with the second solution. Unfortunately I’m working 1 day/week on the project now (spending other days on new projects), mainly to complete the intro sequence, so I don’t think I’ll be able to make that happen any time soon.