Soooo... haven't been working on any VERGE projects. But I thought I would share with you my little game engine demo project that I made for my first game development CS 321 assignment. It's really, really short. These screenshots are basically the whole thing. Plus a menu. Plus a parallax background. It made be appreciate what VERGE already does for you with its map and tiling system.
You'll need python:
http://www.python.org/ftp/
and pygame:
http://www.pygame.org/ftp/
And here's the game itself:
gmae.zip
Our next project, which I'm working on right now uses Blender. And our third one uses an interactive fiction engine called Inform 7, which I'm pretty excited about.