Entering textjam spring 2026

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…