how star challenger fits in 200KB

hey there, just recently ive made a small bullet hell-ish game in under 200KB

in this post ill briefly go over how i accomplished this for those who dont want to read the source code

engineless

star challenger was programmed basically from scratch, using an engine or a framework alone would make filesize hit past 200KB before id even write a line of code, so instead it uses C and the Tigr (tiny graphics) library, which is only around 50KB.

audio

if you play the game you will quickly notice how primitive it sounds. thats because the audio synthesizer i wrote literally plays back a single square wave and one static noise at a time, like a 2nd-3rd-ish generation console. unfortunately, the portaudio library adds ~100KB to our filesize. theres not much i can do about it aside removing sound entirely.

graphics

all the graphics used by the game fit in a 56x40 pixel image, thats less than 500 bytes in PNG format, and conveniently, Tigr can decode PNG (though it probably adds to filesize a little..), there is not much i can say here, aside most of the graphics being sitelen pona text

i hope that covers it all, as a few final notes, c code is usually tiny, everything was compiled with size optimizations, enemy waves take a couple bytes per enemy, and enemy AI is a few short C functions