Yeah from what I read so far it will. I kind of hope for a few graphics like some ASCII magic animations, though, since unfortunately I'M not really a big fan of text-only games. Illusiat 13 uses a technique to keep the program for the 54 different magic spells as small as possible (1500 bytes)

Nah not compression, I just re-used the exact same code for several magic animations. I'll cemetechize the code then PM you, in case it's disallowed by the contest rules to provide code for entries.

Yeah but in case he wanted to quickly look at the code I decided to PM him. Sadly the code doesn't show up right in SouceCoder, though (well, it does, but SourceCoder formats it a bit differently, so it might be a bit hard to read)

I am sure there could be better ways but there's still the fact it's 54 magic spells packed into this program, when most ROL spells take between 150 and 500 bytes each.

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

The interaction with Items is completely Text based (since there really is no other way to interact with that many Items and possibilities other than text) but the battles will have primitive graphics and animations that change based on what type of weapon you use.  And there is no world exploration, merely a tournament style setting where you need to defeat enemy after enemy, getting new items and building new weapons as you go.  Whenever you defeat an enemy you are able to take one of his equipped weapons, and if you lose he takes one of yours.

will you be able to view your current statistics? like accuracy, weight of weapon, chance of being burnt/frozen by your own weapon, etc?

For every single item you have you will be able to view these statistics:

Weight:
Size:
Temperature:
Flammability:
Sharpness:
Strength:
Agility:

Yeah from what I read so far it will. I kind of hope for a few graphics like some ASCII magic animations, though, since unfortunately I'M not really a big fan of text-only games. Illusiat 13 uses a technique to keep the program for the 54 different magic spells as small as possible (1500 bytes)

Yep don't worry the battle animations should hopefully be cool And yeah i too am using a dynamic system to display animations, so that even the same type of attack (thrust for example) will look and behave differently for different weapons.  Currently i have 3 attacks coded: Swing, Thrust, and Throw.  Im brainstorming more attack types for melee weapons (since thats what all of them basically are).

OMG.
SUMMON NIGHT: SWORDCRAFT STORY FTW.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6zJj4xKTO0

Oh and shmibs your edit made me crack up.

Me too.  Every single time I read it.

So update on this specific game... it might never be finished for technical and gameplay reasons, it just isn't working out.  The amount of data i have to sort and sift through ingame is huge, i have to jump through hoops just so that you don't get loading screens every menu.  And that is ignoring the issue of saving, which would have to be either 2 min of loading or it uses a couple of you String variables and Lists And thats not even counting the issues i am having with gameplay...

Im gonna release the source for people to play with, and i'm leaving it open, but i dont see any way i can finish this...

(on a side note, i had started a separate entry to the cage match a couple days, and it is already complete and finished)

Note that there is a lot that *is* finished.  For instance you can combine items correctly, you can decombine them, you can even kinda go into battle with them, but the overall game framework is missing