On September 4 I sent a game to a contest with one hard limit: unpacked, the whole thing has to fit on a 1.44MB floppy disk. That is 1,474,560 bytes, runtime included. No browser, no server, nothing fetched later. The game is called LOUD // 144. For most of its life it was called ECHOFALL, which told you nothing until you had already played it.
You are in a dark field. Nothing is visible until an echo touches it, and what the echo showed you fades in a few seconds. Walking sends out a small echo. Firing sends out a big one, and everything that hears it turns toward the spot you fired from. To see, you have to make noise. Noise is how they find you.
Early on I decided that every sound would be made by the program while it runs, with no audio files at all. It felt like the proper way to make something floppy-sized. The gunshot came out sounding like a toy drum. Nothing in the contest rules asked for this. It was a rule I had made up and was keeping as if it were theirs. The gunfire is now a real recording, and the game still fits with room to spare.
What stayed synthesized is the part that has to answer to where you are standing. When an echo touches something, the reflection comes back late by the round trip, from the direction of whatever it hit. A sour tone is a threat, a ringing one is a supply crate, a dull thud is wreckage. You can hear the room before you see it.
One small bug I liked: the Korean text is drawn from a tiny table that holds only the characters the game uses. A best score of 132 showed up as 13. The 2 wasn't in the table, and the program had skipped it without a word. Now every build checks that all ten digits are there.
The build I submitted is 857,696 bytes, 58 percent of the disk. The results haven't been announced yet. That's where it stands.