When I first read "everything made from scratch", my mind quickly worked its way to "submit a flowchart describing the game" since even the 80x25 text mode a PC will boot into has character "graphics" that I didn't make myself.
...and then I read the engine (and the whole stack of turtles it rests on) could be pre-made provided it was publically available. Crisis averted
For some reason it never struck me until just now that you could just switch into VESA mode without rendering any text first
JigPu