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Pico-8 is an inclusion to the rules we made when we were less sure the Jam would be successful without some kind of escape hatch. Pico in particular was chosen because it limits the CPU cycles games can use. Every Jam we review the rules, though, so it's possible it will be removed in the future.

Welcome to the Jam! We largely organize in the RetroDev Discord, where there will be plenty of people looking for music. Feel free to introduce yourself, and let us know what hardware you've composed for or are willing to try to compose for (this Jam involves a lot more learning than most...)

Awesome! If you haven't already, feel free to join us at the RetroDev Discord linked on the Jam page. Music is missing from so many Jam submissions, so we'd love to have you around.

Welcome! My apologies for taking awhile to get back to you. Music is often the missing element from Jam games, so any musicians can really elevate a submission. If you haven't already, feel free to join the RetroDev Discord where we'll be coordinating for the Jam!

Fantastic! A lot of the games we build for this Jam are short and small. If you haven't already, feel free to join the RetroDev Discord where there are plenty of people looking for collaborations.

Sure, that would be great! Can't wait to see it.

Welcome to the Jam! Fan games and demakes will be fine as long as you don't reuse assets from your commercial inspiration. Remaking a game you're already made is fine, as long as you port the game to a new platform in the process.

I used to play one of the may DOS versions of this game endlessly. Love the warp visual/sound effect!

This is a surprisingly-complete demake! You really did build multiple characters, a whole best-of-three sequence including victory / defeat animations, and a valiant attempt to render the Mortal Kombat theme from a single voice channel. I was pleasantly surprised by this one.

Good-looking palette choices, and about as frustrating as I remember the original being!

It's a really solid base for a top-down adventure game that comes in the form of a mini lesson on the Knights of the Round Table. Also "Maybe the real Grail was the friends we made along the way?" gave me a good chuckle. Whether or not you push forward with this particular codebase or not, you've got the pieces together to start really building out a game here!

The physics feel good, which is honestly 80% of what makes or breaks a platformer. I'd love to see work continue on it!

Even though the game won’t qualify for scoring, it would be a shame for the work to go to waste. I’d go ahead and submit so at least we get a chance to play it, and if you like you could join our Discord server and drop it in our channel for retro-inspired games too!

As long as the schedule of this Jam is followed, are we allowed to submit our game to another Jam that happens during the same period?

Thanks! It's missing so much stuff for sure... We'll probably keep working on it, though

Great question! This Jam is for games that run on the target platform, either under emulation or on real hardware. If the target platform is retro, you can use any tools you like, but the game does need to run on the retro platform.

That‘s a bit marginal, but since this is the first jam I’d say go ahead, and just be sure to mention when you started working on it. Personal or third-party frameworks, engines, code snippets etc. are allowed since a number of genres would be almost impossible to build for some of these older platforms in under a month if we all started from scratch.

As for requiring a finished game, this jam will focus more on playable games than polished titles. Anything playable would be great!

I believe I replied to you on Twitter already, but if anyone else wondering: frameworks and previously-created assets are allowed. They would be practically necessary for some things like complex background scrolling, trig or vector math on pre-floating-point hardware, or for 32-bit consoles where things like loading a model from cart/disk don’t just happen!