I'm pretty sure that many people have played uplink before. My Idea is somewhat similar to what uplink is all about: hacking. However instead of simply buying programs and clicking one utton to break into systems, steal and to manipulate data, the player would be writing those program's himself.
Let's say the player should delete a certain file from a database. He could decide to write a little snippet of code that searches for exactly that file (because the contractor didn't give him the id of that persons entry, the snippet must perform a search first) and then drops it from the database.
Breaking into a system cold involve the very same exploits we see every day: Sniffing, SQL injections, spoofing. In order for the game to be fun, the player should be required to put some effort into his code (for example some algorithm should be fast enough to actually outsmart a firewall).
On the technical side, I wold have to choose a language that easily be hosted. And in order for the code to behave the same on all computers, I would probably need to tick the VM in a fixed time step. Otherwise players with a fast computer will never have to put much thought into it / the same code won't work whe the computer is under heavy load.
Do you think this would be appealing to some people (probably other programmers ^^) and/or to you? Do you see a problem with the design itself? Any feedback and suggestions are welcome.