So my new game which i am going to be working on for my Cage Match is called Ingenuity.  It is going to be a text based kind of battle game where you are put into a tournament situation and must rise to the top to beat the game.  You are given a certain number of normal items in the beginning to do battle with such as baseball bats, chains, and other things.  You can have as many items in your inventory as you want, but you can only bring three into battle.  Your opponent (computer controlled) also has 3 items and you two must do battle using the attributes and advantages of your weapons to get through your opponents weak spots.  As you beat enemies and rise in the game, you find new items and add into your inventory.

The reason this game is called Ingenuity is because of the special ability that sets this game apart.  Any two (or sometimes more) items can be combined and their attributes are melded.  If you combine the sledgehammer and the axe,  you will get more cutting power because your axe now has the power of a sledgehammer, but it also gets pretty heavy which might make you less accurate.  Maybe you put gasoline onto your knife and light it with your lighter and now you can stab someone and set them on fire at the same time.  The possibilities are endless!  And the more items you get, the more combinations you can make. 

I already have the Basic Item Mixing algorithm set, as well as a way to specify the attributes of an Item.  Progress should be fairly steady

ooooooh sounds...ingenious. I wonder how big the database would have to be...sort of reminds me of the concept of Scribblenauts. How many different weapons/items do you think you're going to have?

Currently i have 20 items coded, but some are effects and cannot be combined with each other without using an item to combine on.  Like you can't combine gasoline and a lighter just by themselves because thats just fire But if you put the gasoline on an Axe and then light it with the lighter then you have a flaming Axe Note that you cant just light the Axe on fire first, you need to first use the gasoline to make it flammable.

Also if you have a flaming weapon, the hotter its burring the higher chance you have of hurting yourself as well this also applies to cold things as well.  Also objects can break depending on how strong they are, like a baseball bat itself would break after a bit, but if you use Duct Tape on it, it will last longer Or if you combine it with a stronger item like an Axe or Chain ect...

There will most likely be only menu's for the building of your weapons, there might be dynamic display of weapons but that would be crazy hard to do since there are already over 5000 different weapons possible.  For the battles i will probably have small basic animations for the basic attacks you can do with your objects, but the objects themselves will not accurately represent the look of the object.  And there will be animations for effects and stuff, if you set your opponent on fire there should be a fire animation, if you stab him its a stabbing animation ect...

And these are some of the weapons i have experimented with so far and what they do:
Sledgehammer + Axe: Weight of a sledgehammer but the sharpness of an Axe
Ice + slingshot: A cold projectile that really doesn't do much damage
Knife + Gasoline + Lighter + Crossbow: A crossbow that shoots flaming knives!  Extremely deadly   
Bowling Ball + Chain + Razors: Kind of like a mace.  Heavy and deadly but inaccurate 

Ah ok I see. Hopefully you can make it complete enough to be fun. Text games are not very popular because people got sick to death of seeing them flooding ticalc.org archives making it harder to find games with actual graphics, so it's best that text games are made as good as possible to stand out from the others.

I like the ideas so far by the way.

Sweet.  This is going to be EPIC.
So in some cases, there'll be a penalty on using one weapon for too long, especially if it's been buffed up by being set on fire?

Its more like it just breaks after a certain amount of time combining items in general makes them weaker, but adding duct tape or welding can make them stronger for a bit.  So pretty much everything breaks at some point or another unless you just keep welding it or adding more duct tape.  You just need to make sure you don't break all your weapons in the middle of the tournament or else you wont be able to combine anything and have to default to just using items normally for a bit until you find a few more (and yes you can use them without combining them ) You win an item after every battle so that means you can afford to break a weapon every 2 battles to keep up an inventory of simple weapons.

Will it be completely text based? Like "Player attacks!" "You see a room to the north." kind of thing?