Uridium on the C64 would have been maybe 10,000 lines of assembler to make a 16K executable, plus all the graphics loaded as data. Not a single comment was written in the source code; to keep files sizes and assembly times down.
And never used screen buffering on 8-bit. Games that scroll slowly can use buffering to prepare the next scroll character position over multiple frames, allowing time to run a sprite multi-plexor. Uridium and Alleykat copy the whole screen every frame, chasing the raster.
Source: twitter.com