I decided to participate in Jack Harrhy's "game jam-like" for text-based projects, textjam.
It's my first time participating in any kind of a jam. The requirements are pretty permissive. We just have to create something that outputs only to a terminal; no graphics allowed. Also, LLMs are strongly discouraged, and only allowed if you describe exactly how and where you used them. Oh, and it should really be something created entirely for the jam, and not be part of some larger extant project.
And, of course, it should be fun and entertaining. So while non-games are allowed, it should really be a game, or at least some kind of toy.
The hard part here was figuring out what to build. My first idea was writing a planet generator kind of like what I have on Iron Arachne. The trick there is that the planet images would have to be built from ASCII characters. That is definitely going to be difficult, though not impossible.
Other options I thought about included things like a language generator, a simple roguelike, an ASCII clone of Legend of Zelda... there are a ton of possibilities. I was tempted to pursue a bigger project, but given my inexperience in writing games, I would probably underestimate how much time it takes.
The planet generator idea is pretty safe, even if it does have a difficult component. It doesn't require animation, collision detection, or interactivity. If I decided to make a sci-fi text-based game in the future, it could also prove useful.
A lot of the math for planet statistics I already have figured out as a result of the Iron Arachne version. I could probably expand those, too, and make the descriptions more interesting.
So, having decided on the project, the next decision to make was what language to use for writing it. The language has to allow for rapid iteration. It should be able to run on any of the major operating systems. And it should be fun to use.
I briefly considered using Rust, but that's too heavy for this. The same is true for C, C++, and so on. Java's out because I hate Java. My short list ended up being Javascript, Python, Go, and Crystal. I really was leaning towards Crystal, but in the end, I decided making the result cross-platform was more work than it was worth. Javascript was too familiar, since Iron Arachne was already built in it. I eliminated Go from consideration because, while it checked all the boxes, the iteration loop was just a smidge too slow. So, the language I decided on was Python.
The name needed to be meaningful, but also as unique as possible. "Planet-gen" was the first thing that popped into my head, but I discarded that as way too boring. Then I looked up terms for the creation or birth of planets. The scientific process for that is "accretion," and since I like the idea of verbs as CLI commands, I changed that to "akrete." So, that's the project's name. I created the git repository for it on Codeberg.
Now I have until June 7 to build this and submit it. I don't know if it'll be done in a few hours, a few days, or not until the full month is over. We'll see!