Since all of us were busy and the original date did not work, we have decided to redo this game jam and move it to Saturday, 6 May. We are looking at a one day commitment, no previous programming, artwork, or music skills required.
Currently, we are talking about creating a turn based game using ASCII characters for artwork. This would be in a similar vein to Angband (http://rephial.org/). As Angband evolved, they added graphics packs to the game, but you can still turn them off and play in ASCII character glory. See image below for example. Most of the old BBS games used ASCII graphics as well (pre-internet online gaming. Yeah, I'm getting old).
RB also brought up ZZT by Epic MegaGames https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYec26rPejE, an ASCII cult classic.
The point of the ASCII characters is to reduce the artwork burden and try something new from the past.
I propose the following game jam theme:
Create a turn based game using ASCII characters. The game would include a random map generator and the ability to interact with the environment (IE open doors, pick up items, go up and down stairs, etc). I think the long term goal would be to add stats to the character that could be leveled up and combat, but I wouldn't mind if these two aspects stayed on the back burner unless time allows.
If anyone wants to chime in with a different idea, please do so. To keep us from getting crunched for time, lets shoot for proposing new ideas or amendments by the end of the day Wednesday. This would give us a couple days to iron out the specifics before the end of the week.