ORIGINAL TWIST FOR SPACE INVADERS, MAYBE?

Hi everyone,
I'm trying to reacclimate myself here. I'm pretty sure this is the right place to post such a question or idea.

I'm currently taking a digital design class at school, and our group has decided for our semester project to replicate the original Space Invaders, but maybe with a couple twists to be decided. Our goal is to produce a working model of the game to be run on an FPGA (essentially a nifty little thing that lets us model and "program" hardware). We will be leveraging Verilog.

Since this goes beyond what seems to be the norm of RPGMaker or C or Java in that we will be designing the hardware too, I thought some of you might like to follow on this project. It is something I don't see around all that much either. For those who do know programming, this could be a way to look a little deeper into what a computer does running your code; it could help remove some of the aspects of what you might regard as a "black-box." For people who are beginning to learn to program, it might be useful to you to see because it might illuminate why programing languages have what appear to be funky features, maybe something like pointers or the stack. For those who don't touch computers for reasons like that, maybe it will seem like less of a magic box and more of a logic box.

I'm hoping to document many things in this project, including:

Our high-level modules
Designs within each of those modules
Verilog Code for those modules
Our Instruction Set
The assembly on our ROM, including some how-tos on asm (this is where the "code" be)
thinking behind other modules driving graphics and sound, etc

I faintly remember some blogging like feature here for games, and I'll use that too, but my gut says a thread here might be more open. How do I do those things too?

The toughest thing about this is that it will not be easy to get access to play. You would need an FPGA, and even then, the pinnings we would make might not be any good for someone else who picks up the code.

So, you have feed back for this? I thought since it is unique in a way here for games, it might catch some interest. Is this something you'd like to learn about? Is there anything I should elaborate maybe?

Sorry about being MIA for a month.

Updates:

-Will have the processor designed by the end of the week! Thank God
-Can talk about the instruction set. We have maybe 25 instructions I think, nothing fancy so there is no floating point or vector junk.
-working on the first subroutines to place in the ROM

Hoping to update this between Sunday and Next wednesday.

In other news, I think after the semester I will post a version of Space invaders in good old C/C++ so that everyone can get access to it.

And ShortStar, I will still shoot down the reclaimers indiscriminately. We won this planet, we keeping the sucker.