Something that made full use of the Pandora's controls would make sense...
...but might tend to be too complicated
<thinks>
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EDIT:
<has idea>
You control a submarine, and your task is to destroy various enemy objects/vehicles
As you achieve certain goals you are rewarded with either:
- new/better weapons
- a upgraded onboard computer
The player would be able to write an increasingly complex program to automate functions on board the sub, but this would be severely limited by imaginary specs of the virtual computer
To start with, your opponents would be weak and few - and you would control all functions of your submarine with dpad, nubs, shoulder buttons, ABYX buttons
you would gradually gain enough memory/performance* to automate functions in your sub, and even redirect some of the controls as inputs to your program
As the opponents became stronger/more aggressive, you would need a combination of good reactions and good programming, allowing yourself to concentrate on the more tricky operations.
as an endgame, you would have to abandon your craft and let the AI written over the course of the game fight the last battle itself
* a simple way of doing this would be to limit the lines available to write code in, as long as the interpreted language used required white-space formatting
Some good things about this would be:
- It appeals to the instinctive hackers
- most of the interesting gameplay would be provided by the player, not the developers
- there are plenty of interpreted languages we could use
- it combines action with puzzle
- it could start of as a pretty simple shooter, and more automation commands could be added over time
- people like games where they can apply their own style to the game environment - sandboxes etc