Last night at 7pm I awoke (after a benadryl-induced nap) to discover that the contest had started earlier than expected (5pm Pacific Time to be exact).  One teammate and I discussed a few details about the project, and fleshed out the idea.  

Today at 1:30pm the four programmers met to discuss the project:  
1. We will use pygame as the underlying engine
2. We use MVC architecture to separate the data from the logic from the view
3. Details of the game will be shared later, for now we are just happy to agree on something.  

A group of 4 people with different ideas of how to accomplish something can make it difficult to come together on a design and effort, but somehow we are making it work.

Accomplishments so far:
1. Keyboard input accepts arrow keys to move and esc to quit
2. Tiles display on map from CSV format
3. Characters appear on map, but in the wrong places.  Working on the math for this will be a bit complicated for me.

Good luck to all the contestants!