Description

You have traveled back in time to the 90s! You look around your room and see a massive collection of games. Mario, Zelda, Mega Man, Castlevania, Metroid, Sonic, Street Fighter, and more, all waiting to be played. You can listen to your older brother playing Doom in the other room and The Simpsons on the family TV. You see posters of the Ninja Turtles and Transformers, along with countless toys of all kinds. You can even sense the smell of pizza coming from the kitchen! So many great memories are coming back to you!

You go and turn on your computer and see something different. Not only is your computer more advanced than it ever was before. (Heck, you don't even remember having a computer all for you, you always shared the family computer) It now has a brand new program pre-installed: RPG Maker. "Awesome!" you think, "I can make one of those cool Final Fantasy games!". You proceed to spend hours planning how to make your dream game; thinking of sharing it with all your friends at school until you realize something... You only have a single floppy disk to put the game on.

Well, not everything was better in the past.

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The 1.44 Floppy disk event is a way to celebrate the now-obsolete data storage medium and also a way to go back in time and appreciate how valuable space back then; where every single byte was valuable and games were optimized to make the most of each one (Unlike modern games were 50+ GB games has kind of become the norm).

The idea is simple: Make a game that can fit into one floppy disk. While there were lots of different kinds of disks with varying capacities back then, the most standard and well-known was the 1.44 MB one. You are free to do whatever you want as long as it can fit into those 1.44 MB. You are not restricted to the technology of the era either. Any modern game engine is fair game, as long as the compressed game still fits into 1.44 MB.


RULES:
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- Teams are allowed.

- You may use any engine.

- You can use any resources you've made in the past. This includes making resources before the event officially starts.

- The games must be uploaded to the event page.

- There must be at least 10 minutes of gameplay.

- The game size can't be larger than 1.44 MB. (After compression of course)

- RTP is allowed but the game should run without it installed. If you need help here are some tutorials for RPG Maker 2003

- The game should be able to run out of the box with minimal fussing. This ideally means that it should run by just clicking the .exe file. But if the game requires some extra files then those same files should go within the 1.44 MB limit.

- The event begins on Wednesday the 14th of April and ends at 4:00 am Thursday the 29th of April. (14.4 days. Get it?)

- RPG Maker VX / Ace, MV, and MZ are not available for this event. Their projects even stripped down to the bare minimum don't give enough room to fit into 1.44 MB. You can still use them if you somehow manage to make the game fit though. Good luck!

- Any questions? You can send a PM to "El_WaKa" on RMN or "WaKa" in the Discord server.

REWARDS:
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The best overall game will not only receive "The Golden Disk" achievement but it will also get to pick a free steam key from a list of almost 400+ games! All aspects of a game are taken into consideration (graphics, sound, gameplay, etc.) with the extra emphasis on how much unique content is available in the limited space.

There are also some extra achievements and makerscore to be won!:

"Don't copy that Floppy" 14 MS: For releasing a demo.

"The Master Copy" 60 MS: For finishing a game.

"The Golden Disk" 70 MS: For the best overall game.

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The event is over! Check out the results over here!
Congratulations to Unchained by Decky! You won the Golden Disk!

Details

  • 04/14/2021 12:00 AM
  • 04/29/2021 04:00 AM
  • 10

Achievements

Registration

You must be logged in to sign up for 1.44 Floppy Disc Event .

Teams Members Entry
Looks like I need to try something beside MV
This team has performed an illegal action and will be shut down.
Nostalgia
Everybody do the flop!
Tass Times in RMN
www.eMachinesFloppyDiskSettlement.com
Mirak calls for help! But no one came...
shittyabandonwarez.cn/dos/drekirokr-3540/download/
I miss floppy disks
flop pies
Diskette 0 Drive Seek Failure
Keep on smilin'
Insert the system disk before inserting the game disk.
C:\DOS\Run
It's very interesting
Fflo's Quest inside Naughty Lord's Dungeon, should be "released" on the Nintendo DS
RM1K44(B)
Flippity Flappity Floop
Keep the faith and run away!
RPG Maker 1440
Momekas one man band
Yeah why not
Floppy, but not sloppy
You said we couldn't, so we did.
360kB is enough for anyone
Sandware
I copied that floppy
is it time?
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (sometimes casually referred to as a floppy or diskette) is a type of disk storage composed of
Floppy0153
Floppy Disks were invented by computers to help us
RM_256k
Friends: The JRPG
1998 called. ...Can...Can I stay there for a while? Please? :o
Team Double Density
(A)bort (R)etry (F)ail
Final Fantasy but bigger
GOT 144 PROBLEMS BUT THE DISC AIN'T ONE
Still Loading...
An excuse to use RM 2k again
First time using 2003. Hope this works
Vitrolic Virtue Studio
Floppy Healy
America On-Lion Free Trial Disc
Floppin' on the Floor
Magick SOFT

Posts

Hmm...I'm curious and may actually participate in this. I'll see. Not having to make a gamepage for the game is a plus, honestly, at it means I don't need to make something that's worth keeping on my permanent record of games, haha.

Edit: ...HUH. My last RPGmaker 2000 game (The Heroes That Nobody Asked For) which is like an hour long isn't even 1.44 megs uncompressed. ...Now I'm REALLY tempted to participate.

author=Illy
The mouse cursor is really messing with me :O

So it's not just me!
Sooz
They told me I was mad when I said I was going to create a spidertable. Who’s laughing now!!!
5354
I hate that mouse cursor

Cursed cursor

cursedor
Oh dang, we have two whole weeks to make something.

...Yeah, ok I'm in.

The only issue is, my only compact idea so far is...Not super narrative? It's basically a "one way dungeon crawler" where you send in a party of 3, go until they die, next party of 3 goes, until you are out of characters or you kill the boss.

That...Doesn't really leave much room for character development, especially if I go with the idea of "You get the first strike in all fights, you and the enemy both do stupid high damage. Kill ASAP or be killed" to keep it tight and quick, lol.
The journey to get a blank Ace project as small as possible for this event is an interesting one. So far I've left room for 50 kb of actual game. Still some fluff to trim though.
I'm planning on doing a Gameboy homebrew. I've been so excited for this event for like, an entire month, and I've been learning how to program the Gameboy. It's pretty fun, it's actually really nice to write homebrew for. The CPU is super limited, but the PPU is really easy to use.

I'm planning on a game that has somewhat simple mechanics and limited graphics/audio. I think I can finish it in 2 weeks.

I'm planning on my game using the mapper MBC1 or MBC3, targeting 64KB of ROM. That means you could load the ROM and a Windows-based Gameboy emulator onto a single floppy disk.
My plan is going for a impossible 256kb uncompressed RPG Maker 2000 game, no RTP.
Hoping this thing will not get too technical.

So far so good, 231kb RPG_RT (And I think is still even more optimizable) :D

author=Racheal
The journey to get a blank Ace project as small as possible for this event is an interesting one. So far I've left room for 50 kb of actual game. Still some fluff to trim though.

You can do a LOT in just 50k if you're really trying. There's been pretty popular computers back in the 80's that had less than that for their total memory.

Can't do any high-rez graphix though.
This is good... After compressing the RPG_RT EXE file, it makes my base project only 304KB after 7-Zip compression.

author=AlaskanEmily
I'm planning on doing a Gameboy homebrew. I've been so excited for this event for like, an entire month, and I've been learning how to program the Gameboy. It's pretty fun, it's actually really nice to write homebrew for. The CPU is super limited, but the PPU is really easy to use.

I'm planning on a game that has somewhat simple mechanics and limited graphics/audio. I think I can finish it in 2 weeks.

I'm planning on my game using the mapper MBC1 or MBC3, targeting 64KB of ROM. That means you could load the ROM and a Windows-based Gameboy emulator onto a single floppy disk.

According to Liberty, that's not allowed... I wanted to do the same thing too, trust me
author=AlaskanEmily
I'm planning on doing a Gameboy homebrew. I've been so excited for this event for like, an entire month, and I've been learning how to program the Gameboy. It's pretty fun, it's actually really nice to write homebrew for. The CPU is super limited, but the PPU is really easy to use.

I'm planning on a game that has somewhat simple mechanics and limited graphics/audio. I think I can finish it in 2 weeks.

I'm planning on my game using the mapper MBC1 or MBC3, targeting 64KB of ROM. That means you could load the ROM and a Windows-based Gameboy emulator onto a single floppy disk.

According to Liberty, that's not allowed... I wanted to do the same thing too, trust me

I've been thinking about this since a lot of people wanted to try out GB Studio and I'm all for people trying out new engines. I came to the conclusion that as long as all the files you need to run the game fit into the 1.44 Mb then it's allowed. Think about it as sharing the floppy disk with a friend that only has a floppy disk drive, has no internet connection, and has a clean installation of Windows (aside from WinRAR and such). You would try to put the emulator along with the game, you know?

I've updated the rules to reflect this. So yeah, GB Studio is allowed as long as you can find a way to make the games run and make it fit within the restriction. (I actually found two GB emulators that are around 440kb when stripped to the basics. And even one that was 146kb!)
BGB is a tiny GB/GBC/Super GB emulator, it's only like 850KB even unzipped. Nothing except a very large GB game would be too big to fit with it, even without zipping it up.
author=AlaskanEmily
BGB is a tiny GB/GBC/Super GB emulator, it's only like 850KB even unzipped. Nothing except a very large GB game would be too big to fit with it, even without zipping it up.


PlayGuy is even smaller, 256 KB unzipped
author=Soulrain
author=AlaskanEmily
BGB is a tiny GB/GBC/Super GB emulator, it's only like 850KB even unzipped. Nothing except a very large GB game would be too big to fit with it, even without zipping it up.
PlayGuy is even smaller, 256 KB unzipped

Running through Blargg's test ROMs, PlayGuy seems pretty inaccurate. I'm sure it's fine if you just want to run stuff on emulator, but given how badly it fails the instruction timing and instruction flags tests in particular I wouldn't want to develop anything with it that I expected to run properly on real hardware.
I'm gonna make a game, and I will finish it.

Yeeeahhhh...
90? Hmm... Simpsons at tv? Well... There was not Simpsons... And... And not these games after all... Hynk...

Just Something else... hhynk... just 90 ... hynk maybe Italy 90?
Cap_H
DIGITAL IDENTITY CRISIS
6625
Great idea for an event!

I probably won't have time to do anything, but if I do I'll try to include an episode of friends.

Also, it would be really cool to send Libby an actual floppy with your game for an extra achievement.
SunflowerGames
The most beautiful user on RMN!
13323

What engines would this be feasible on... Something that requires more coding... Ren'Py might be the way to go, not sure? That restriction might make this event quite hard.
author=kory_toombs
What engines would this be feasible on... Something that requires more coding... Ren'Py might be the way to go, not sure? That restriction might make this event quite hard.
Ren'py is way too big.

Unless someone finds a nice trick that I missed. Even an EMPTY project is around 30 MB. (Ok you probably could throw out much of the GUI graphics and save a bit, but don't forget that you will be bundling a whole python environment with your game)

EDIT: If you just published the source you could stay below 1.44 MB, but that means the game would only run if your audience installs ren'py ... somehow I don't think that's covered by the rules ...
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
This could be tricky.

EDIT: Even a default RPG Maker 95 game is larger than this.
No, I think that would break the rules. If assuming players have Ren'py was ok, it would also mean any console ROM game could assume the player has the emulator, and technically also assume RM players have RTPs installed.

The general idea I think is to make a self-contained thing that needs nothing else other than Windows installed/present (the trick answer for HTML games is that Windows bundles a crappy web browser since 98, so... it technically counts? Hey HTML nerds, start making games with ActiveX components xD).

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As someone else suggested, I think we can make a database of game engines, with their minimal sizes. I'll be using the RM Steam releases for reference. These are the ones I've tried.

RPG Maker 2000 - Min. size: 250Kb (with UPX)
Currently the most optimized. A vanilla executable with an empty database and no files is around 750Kb total. Compressed (either 7zip ultra or UPX) an empty project can very well fall under 250Kb.
To fully remove the RTP dependency requires the following files: one character (for vehicles), system, title and gameover graphics. All empty should be around an extra 5kb at minimum (a 320x240 black png is 1.41kb).

RPG Maker 2003 - Min. size: 537Kb (with UPX)
What adds the most is the ultimate_rt_eb.DLL which you can't pack with UPX, but actually after compression it doesn't add that much (around 380kb as 7z ultra).
Fixing RTP dependency is mostly the same as RM2k, only adding the pesky system2 file.

OHR RPG CE - Min. size: 1284Kb (without UPX)
It's actually better to not use UPX and just compress with 7zip with the Ultra setting. Which might actually mean it's the same for the others. It leaves you very little space to play around (especially for sound).
Take into account this includes some simple images and configurations (a couple data entries for an enemy, a character, a map, and some simple graphics).

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Useful links:
7zip: https://www.7-zip.org/
UPX: https://upx.github.io/
OHRRPGCE: https://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Downloads
EasyRPG Tools: https://easyrpg.org/tools/downloads/ (png2xyz, xyzcrush, xyzthumbnailer are quite useful for dealing with xyz files)
I love the idea!

If anybody needs a pixel artist, let me know.
Otherwise, I might make a game on my own.