@thenotrashcougar, it’d be neat to be able to not just expose these ideas, but make them downright easy. It depends on the framework you’re using and if it gets in the way or not. And since I don’ t know the framework, I’m obviously talking out my arse. But this is Pinside!
I’m imagining opening the coin door, going into the menu, and selecting “Scott’s Awesome Competition Modes”. In there are “1 reactor”, “3 reactor”, and whatever other awesome ideas come up. Selecting this, configures the difficulty, the reactor count, disables high scores and replays. And, most important, *doesn’t* save the configuration to storage. On reboot, the original operator settings would be restored. This would then stay an owner/operator-initiated thing, but perhaps expose these cool things on a much broader basis.
An *extension* of this idea would be to take any operator configuration, and store it as a saved configuration. Let people load that saved configuration temporarily, or set the boot mode to that configuration.