[mips_r4300i]

Nand2tetris, skip around until you find something that interests you.

Fpga4fun is a other good resource if it's still around.

Try and do some stuff besides just another softcore CPU in the beginning, even if it seems redundant. Maybe try a VGA pattern generator with some cosine LUTs or something.

[djmips]

In a game jam a friend and myself turned the Nand2tetris computer into a working computer on an FPGA board with VGA output. Then we built a small game (game and watch level) using the Nand2Tetris high level language. Very fun.