Choosing a Weapon

So, it's the start of a new Lisp Game Jam. Yet another chance to tilt at the windmill!

This time around, I'd like to do something that's really fun. I'd also like to... finish it.

What is finished? 

• Sound
• Music
• Story? Plot?
• Recognizable artwork.
• Things for the player to do.
• Gamespace should feel alive and reactive.
• FUN!

Looking at my back catalogue, too much of it feels "dead" or just too simply implemented to be entertaining for a modern audience. Simple doesn't have to be bad though... My highest rated game ever was basically a canvas with some really badly drawn tiles.

I'm considering several different platforms, but I need to make up my mind soon:

• Urlang (with Racket)
• Janet
• PunyGUI (Janet with some built-in stuff to make it useful and distributable)
• I'm gonna' make my own Lisp! With Blackjack and... Actually, no, I'm not doing this.

So three choices. I definitely have a handle on Urlang. I like it and I can get results. Also, it runs in a web browser and almost everybody has one of those handy. This means that I have the possibility of getting rated by more people since they can see my effort no matter their architecture.

Janet is a nifty new (to me) Lisp variant. It's possible to compile it to WASM to run in a browser, but I think I'll probably just do something for Windows and maybe Linux if I use it, since I'll want to use raylib/jaylib.

PunyGUI has a terrible name, but good intentions (both its author and Janet's were inspired by REBOL). It doesn't have raylib, but it does have the Lua GUI library -- Iup -- built in. Along with Circlet (web server) and SQLite. The big advantage with it is that I can write a "thing" in Janet, and then distribute the runtime for multiple operating systems and the thing should just work. However, I've had some problems with Iup and unexpected crashes, so a bit worried about it.

Another thing that strikes me just now... It would be really cool if what I did was a "construction kit" -- so basically, it had the level editor built into it. This adds a lot of potential complexity, but would make it really easy to build out a scenario if I can figure one out.

And one last thing! I need art and videos to sell people on the wonder of whatever it is. These can maybe be handled after the fact, but would be good to have them as soon as possible.

But the most important question -- what am I going to do?