I wonder how do they want to overcome the memory limit? Or will it be using cartridge extensively?

One floppy holds 176KB per side. One full screen of bitmap graphics is 8KB+1KB color, but the game fills only about 2/3 of the screen, so lets say 6KB w/o any compression.

I don't think it's a problem. The game is static enough I think it'd even be viable to hide most loading time even from a real floppy w/behind animation (e.g. slow down door opening and a fade long enough for a decent fast loader to load 6KB)

I don’t get your concern. Could you please be a bit more specific?

The artist and its partner are two high profile guys from the demo scene. They know what they are doing and the game logic ain’t that complicated since point and click is deterministic and finite. This ain’t no open world game.

The challenges evolve around the graphics. Interlaced multi screen multi color pixel art is the bottleneck here. IRQ loaders are bound to available cycle time so there won’t be any usage of FLI.

Since no ascii graphics compression is possible the designers need to consider the amount of branches you can take to several local views when walking around the huge map. Too many graphic details will amount to huge loading times - a problem the later Monkey Island games back then already faced.

Since the C64 graphics modes are not dynamic you can predetermine them by a simple formula: more beauty amounts to more memory usage alias overall loading times.

Using not the full screen is a slight advantage here.

I believe the guys will come up with a great game. It won’t be fast paced this is for sure but it won’t be a beauty killed by its loading times like it is 1987 either.

Modern flash carts like EasyFlash and clones allow for absolutely cavernous cartridge images. As good examples, see the C64 ports of Prince of Persia and Eye of the Beholder, which run entirely from massive cartridge ROMs.

You can load from disk (or tape) on-demand?