Heya,
I'm a fan of SimTower, used to play that all the time. I am also a developer. I am currently working on a 2D game engine that's closed source (I haven't decided whether I want to open source it yet). It's written in C and uses SDL for input and graphics.
I'd be willing to work on a SimTower clone, and I would consider open sourcing my engine. The problem is that I'm not a graphic designer, and I'm frankly quite bad at graphics. So if I could get a bunch of artists to do all of the graphics, I could probably throw together a simple demo in a couple of days.
My engine currently has a simple state machine, labels, sprites (with separate animations, each with separate frames), parallax scrolled backgrounds, and of course general input (mouse movement, mouse buttons, etc).
Currently I'm writing a separate physics engine which could be integrated into the game engine to simulate 2D physical interactions in real time (collision detection, impulse response, etc). This wouldn't be useful for a SimTower clone, but still pretty exciting.
Here's a simple demo of the parallax scrolled backgrounds and an animated sprite:
http://russfrank.us/dl.php?fge_parallax.zip
Virus scanning:
http://virusscan.jotti.org/en/scanresul ... 51cef076c7
WASD movement, he blinks when standing still, and no he can't jump or shoot. This is an engine demo, not a megaman clone. I just used megaman because the sprites are easy to find online and like I said, I'm not really an artist ;P Also, the background images are taken from the wikipedia article on parallax scrolling.
If anyone here is a good graphic artist and is actually serious about this, please do contact me (rfrank.nj [at] gmail [dot] com). All I'm looking for is graphic artists (and any other C developers). If you aren't one of these two things, wait until it moves a little further before you try and help out. No, I don't need website designers or hosts, I can do all of that stuff, just graphic artists or C developers.