Stayed up well into the morning working on a few mock-ups. I squeezed in a few hours of sleep and everything has passed the "morning after" inspection.
Up first, is my "match 3" dungeon crawler. I haven't quite worked out all of the details, but the point of the game will be to purely chase a high score by matching pieces on the game board. The twist is there are monsters that will show up that have to be defeated as well. Unlike typical "match 3" games, the pieces aren't already there. Each "turn" you will be given a random piece that has to be placed on the board. The game is over once you can no longer place your piece. Matching some pieces will clear, while others will leave behind a new piece. I envision the monsters movement being kind of like a turn based strategy game - each piece placed counts as the players turn and the monsters will perform their move afterwards.
Option two - my brawler. With clear inspirations from River City Ransom, I still don't have an exact story idea yet (but I have decided I'm going to call it 'Lake Town Rumble'). I seriously think it will just be some big boss has decided to put out a bounty on your character and now all of the gangs are out to collect. Basically beat your way to the boss to clear the bounty. I like the idea of an RCR style "open world" or maybe "metriodvania" is more appropriate term - basically certain paths are block until you have a necessary skill or item and you will need to back track to collect said skills and items until you can access the final big bad. I've created the initial animations for the player character (idle, punch, jump, walk, run), everything I should need to start working on a prototype. I guess we will see if I can get over the obstacle of coding a good foundation for the brawler mechanic.
We'll see where the rest of the day takes me.