[quote name='DrMadolite' timestamp='1335867823' post='4936370']
But I mean, if the point was to ask for technical methodology, then fair enough. So maybe I'm being a bit redundant here.

Although I personally want to hear about technical methodology and why someone familiar with, say, 3 game engines, would choose engine A for game X but engine B for game Y, if others are more interested in discussing design I think there's room to discuss both.
[/quote]You are not a programmer, right? No one is familiar with 3 engines, it would be time prohibitive. Everyone selects their favourite one and stick to it whatever game they are making. It's simply impractical for the same programmer to make game A with engine X and game B with engine Y. They would get confused quickly and could not reuse their code (and programmers reuse way, way more code designers would expect). Plus you would be getting a lot of "custom built engine" answers.
In short starting a topic asking what would you use if you make game X and what would you use making game Y would give you similar results. Also the answers not necessarily would be optimal, you would be getting a lot of personal taste based answers. It would not make sense to make a series of topics about this, the answers each time would be very similar.

What you are asking for is a topic "which engine is best" which is constantly covered on the programmers subboards (there is even a sticky topic for this).

It would make sense if you were asking about platform instead of game type, then yes, there is a set of technologies that are objectively better depending on platform (for Windows only you can use DirectX or OpenGL, for everything else only OpenGL, for mobiles OpenGL ES; then based on these you can eliminate certain groups of engines).

I was thinking that it might be helpful if we had thread once a week where we asked the community "How would you tackle the problem of developing a clone of X game? (replacing all the copyrighted stuff)" Specifically the community would be asked which pieces of software they would use to create the clone and its assets, and how they would analyze or reverse engineer the game to make a detailed development plan, etc.

This sounds potentially more like a For Beginners exercise than a Game Design one. Certainly from a Game Design perspective, decisions regarding tools and engines and so on are not really design decisions. They may be somewhat affected by the game design, but they are not really decisions that are made by the designer.

From a more general perspective, I am not entirely sure how useful or interesting those decisions actually are in a vacuum. Perhaps they might make people aware of tools and languages that they hadn't previously considered, and their relative strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately though, I suspect most will tend to prefer the tools they are most familiar with, and those choices are unlikely to change much on a weekly basis. Even developers with a very broad skillset will likely end up with similar answers on a weekly basis unless the project choices just happen to favour some specific technologies. I'd also have some concerns that the proposed format would result in something like a 'Post Your Favourite' thread where many people post but nobody reads or actually cares about anyone else's answers.

I think a workshop or a challenge format might work better for a regular topic. Another thing that might work (specifically for Game Design) would be a critique - pick a game/some aspect of a game and critique it's implementation, discuss ways of improving it.

All that said, you could always give it a trial run.

As far as Game Design goes, critiquing a well-known game type makes sense. I also think a For Beginners about the technical sides would be nice. It doesn't have to be a "language/SDK X is better" flamewar. Perhaps more "I used this set of tools to make a platformer and these are the pros/cons". Remember that the development is only a small part. Where did you get the art assets, or what tools did you use to make them? Were there any problems importing them for use in your game? How did you rig your models for animation? Did yo have to blend different animations and if so how? Were there collision problems specific to the game type, e.g. due to fast movement or oddly shaped objects?