The one think Spore REALLY didn’t get right was competition within a single predator species, not just competition to survive within the prey species.

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I think the game would need this ability (to be about evolution), but it would also potentially undermine the levelling up side of things, making it an interesting if (again potentially) short lived sandbox.

Overall I’m not feeling it though. The constraint about equal points in a total of three niches feels like it would rapidly devolve, hah, into an eternal cycle at best. In such a trivial situation, evolution possesses no explanatory power – the power of natural selection is in freezing interesting environments into genes, with the most interesting elements usually being other genes in arms races, symbiosis, relatives and what have you. And the beauty of it’s all about blindly breaking out of that kind of artificial constraint to have someone else’s cake and eat it too.

Probably just a change to a more chaotic selection criterion could make it great. Maybe if the player avatar left trails in/pushed against a gelatinous particle fluid, and the targets adapted to camouflage and/or move in that environment, that could lead to interesting interactions like the player constraining their own motions to distinctive shapes or something. I do love both the design power and the poetry of pitting development against adaptation – ontogeny vs. phylogeny if you will. I’m getting sort of a Godfellas vibe, the interaction between one long-lived slow creature and fast ones is great. Maybe bullet-time of some sort is in order?

Me, I’d probably just go the literal route and do the bacterial resistance dilemma. Arena twin-stick or similar genre, or unrelatedly turn-based tiles. Spawn steadily? Waves? Anyway, any enemy that survives being near your attack for a certain time has ‘escaped’ and is now unaffected by your weapon until you run and get a new powerup. Let them spread immunity by touching if you want to get literal about horizontal gene transfer. The dilemma between watching their forces grow while waiting until you can commit to a sweep that will leave zero survivors from an area is the interesting bit. Maybe their movements could be dictated by GA’d Markov chains, so ideally they become more frustrating to your personal movement style as the game progresses. Fun!

Or something about the Baldwin Effect is always fun.

Great idea though.