Coop-etition

I'm planning on making a game for this Versus compo based around the theme of cooperative competition. The idea comes from playing Wii games with friends where we end up griefing each other while also attempting to complete the levels/games. (Think bonus points for pounding your friend with a barrel in New Super Mario Bros. on the way to completing the level for a flavor.)

The plan for the game is a simple overhead fighter kind of game where you can indirectly harm your teammates. Something along the lines of being able to throw items you've found to temporarily knock them out and a slowish move to bump them about.

The goal would be to find a boss/treasure in the level and then be the first one to the exit with the most stuff. Players' final scores would be increased for finishing before others and decreased or invalidated for dying.

Tension Points
1. The more stuff you carry the slower you move. So you want to have the most stuff when you leave, but it makes you slow and you have to throw it for the best possible disabling of fellow players.

2. You're forced to stick together until after the boss/treasure.

3. The best stuff comes from the boss/treasure, but after getting it the level goes into "panic" mode with more dangers.

Tech

Looking at Flashpunk for the front end. I'm new to Flash and it seemed relatively straight forward to work with, so planning on coloring between the lines for the most part. I'm contemplating making movement mouse based to compensate for lag.

I'm undecided on the backend. I may look into Gamer.IO if I can't figure out a Java/Clojure based solution since it seems to have a good Flash story and I'm familiar with C#. On the other hand if I can go with Red5, BlazeDS or something like that with Clojure I'd be happy to stay in Lisp land.

Going to attempt my own pixel art. It's been a while on the art front but something I'd like to get back into.

Any thoughts appreciated!