Do you remember, or at least know about when home computing just began, and you had to pull your games out of a magazine? In the late 1970s, Games on cartridges or floppy disks were very uncommon, so the easiest way to play games at home were to program them yourself. You could order magazines that had pages of code to hand copy. The only downside to this delivery method was that it took a long time to type up depending on the game, and the games themselves had to be restricted in code size so that it wouldn't take longer than an hour to program a game by hand.

In this Jam, I would like to challenge the Pico-8 community to make a functional and entertaining game with the following restrictions:

• Under 100 lines of code
• 10 sprites or less
• 5 or fewer song patterns with less than 10 loops
• If a map is used, it must be 16x16 sprite spaces or less. (A sprite space is 8x8 pixels)

Other Rules:

• You must keep your code clean, that means no more than 2 commands/statements and under 180 characters per line
• comment commands (--comment) should only be used to describe a block of text. Remember that --comments count as lines.
• Just remember, anyone should be able to read the code, type it in manually, create the sprites, and the music in under an hour.

Those are the rules. Submit games on the Jam BBS with the hashtag #MagazineJam in the description or the title somewhere. I'll pick ones that I like and add them to my doc (magazine) of games with the code listed. And yes I will be crediting everyone who entered the jam and got a spot in the "magazine".
Here is the Google Doc (click here) I'm using for the jam.

Have Fun (if you want to)!
-DMP

PS: While there is no deadline for this jam, If you want a bit of a challenge, try to make the game in just one week or less. I will continue checking the jam page for submission throughout this spring of 2017.

Are you setting a deadline or is this just an open call for submissions? (Might be more productive to set a deadline.)

@dddaaannn Open call. If you want to make it a challenge, however, try to finish the game in just one week or less.

sounds like a fun idea, especially considering the restrictions of having to use rectfill() and circfill() for graphics

About to put my submission up ^_^ First post on the forums. Hello everybody.

@Skelteon Hi! I saw your entry. Very impressive. I added your entry to the magazine. Great job Skelteon!

can we get some confirmation / update?

under 10 sprites -- this means 0 to 9 -- but not 10? seems a strange/arbitrary limit (ie: too low? why not 10? why not 0 and for the program to define them and then not limit how many? I mean, I assume that's already valid. :-) )

Lines can be really really long. In fact, I have a nice abusive string/char mapping routine where 1 line could be over 1000 characters long (I had it at 16 lines, but that cost too much, so I reduced it to 4... but perhaps it could be 1?)

Also, restricting by lines is unfortunate... how about limiting by tokens instead? that way we could have --comments and "blank" lines not count against us.

Also, right now, we can get quite a few more lines by abusing 2 statements per line (this affects the line limit, but would be covered under the token limit)

anyway ... just a few thoughts.

Also, is this assuming 8x8 sprites? (even with those, you can use sub-sprite data) ...

9 sprites is 24x24, then.

Still, it seems we should be able to trade lines of code (or algorithm) for sprites.

@scottyelich Hi. I updated the post to address some of your questions. I like the token system, but the idea of the jam is to clearly see what's being written in a line of code. My document is separated into columns, so keeping lines of code short will help squeeze as much code into a page as possible. You can have --comments but I will remove them from the final entry unless they're being used to explain a block of code, but remember the --comments and blank lines will count as a line. Hopefully all of your questions have been answered.

Thanks for the feedback. Happy Coding! :)

Boy I spent days all told, transcribing BASIC programs from my sister's "3-2-1 Contact" magazines, in the late 1980s. Were they really 100 lines or less? haha maybe. It seems like they were pages and pages. Good remembering

Sweet idea. Mine is up.