Anyone know of any communities/game jams with the theme of "has no business running on such low hardware requirements"? Kind of like the demoscene but for games.
There were many games growing up that gave me such a warped view of what was to be expected from the hardware. Battletoads, Crash Bandicoot, Marathon Trilogy (Macintosh), Age of Empires (Multiplayer), Roller Coaster Tycoon (of course).
Corncob 3D was a flight simulator with quite realistic physics and flat shaded 3D graphics written in x86 assembly. It ran pretty well on a 286!
Not entirely sure if it's fit the critera but there is usually pops up retro-themed compos for most retro platforms meaning there's natural hardware restrictions (like demos for retro platforms).
8bit like Nes (Nesjam late may/june), Gameboy(GBJam was last year, bi-annual), Atari,etc, but also for MSDOS, Amiga and more "mid-school" platforms together with semimodern like PS1.
Now, even with modern tools it's plenty of work to get impressive things working on older platforms (I had a Gameboy techdemo last time there was a compo that's due to grow ridiculously much).
Frontier Elite (David Braben). A vast universe, with awesome space flight mechanics (gravity, etc), great graphics/audio, all fitting on one floppy disk. It was coded in assembly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_Elite_II
You could do the slingshot effect in it.
For older games, I would say the original Prince of Persia. I played it on an 8088 machine, and it was pretty impressive how he made the animations sophisticated and smooth.
'Micro Mages': https://morphcat.de/micromages/
Reminds me of this. I found their video that had a breakdown of some of what they needed to do to make a game fit on NES really fascinating!
+1 This needs to exist if it doesn't yet!
Maybe an issue would be people not all having the same type of hardware though? Maybe you target an emulator. (Some Fantasy Consoles sort of count here?)
I haven't looked expensively but some of the retro themed jams were missing the "spirit" I was expecting.
I did a Nokia jam a while back — monochrome, beeps — and I remember being kind of annoyed that the rules technically allowed 3D Unity games as long as they followed resolution and color palette.
(A 3D cube spinning on a TI calculator is a different matter ;)
>Some Fantasy Consoles sort of count here?
They definitely do. I recommend GP check out PICO-8 which has some VERY real games on it like the original Celeste (by its original creators), Cattle Crisis, POOM, Combo Pool, Into Ruins, Dank Tomb, UFO Swamp Odyssey, Porklike, and much more. Most of which you can play on Itch.io for free in your browser.
I’ve been having a blast making a “real” and very full-featured PICO-8 game to serve as a “market fit” prototype — if a PICO-8 game on Itch gets meaningful attention, I’ve “found the fun” and therefore I should make “the full version” (non-PICO-8) for Steam, etc.
Yeah, I imagine a target emulator is the way to go for this kind of thing.
Speaking of your last comment: while very impressive, I feel a bit disappointed when someone's done something amazing with a Game Boy or SNES or whatnot, but the solution involves shoving an entire computer in the cartridge. This is still very cool but your console just becomes a head unit for your GTX 4080 or whatnot.
That made me somewhat disappointed back in the day too, when I realized that some games had extra sound circuitry or even an extra CPU in them.
Wolfenstein 3D would have to be on that list.
I've been enjoying seeing how far people have been pushing the Playdate's hardware.
Demo parties usually have a category for games.