I'll miss the Dec. 1 deadline (so I'll postpone until our next jam, whatever its theme may be), but wanted to share my successes:

• Decide upon a project goal (any game involving tiles forming haiku using common words)
  • Special thanks to "Jeddy" at GameCola for explaining Japanese word validation!
• Install and license free IDEs
  • GameMaker-LTS doesn't feel overwhelming (see GML Code examples e.g. ,"Match 3") but my goal is too ambitious for me to also learn this framework and generate game assets etc.
    
  • Unity Emgine should be my comfort zone, but tutorials railroad me down the path of creating a platformer or creating a FPS, although one tutorial won't install and the other crashes, and my goal is too ambitious for me to also learn this framework and generate game assets etc.
  • PyCharm with Python 3.12 and prototype pythoncode-tutorials is my comfort zone (I'll script everything myself and make my own game asset format if needed); but I enjoyed Thanskgiving with family and I'd gotten sidetracked with GTK and venv and conda setup errors.