MMO - Odd game a la design-your-own-species

I've had this idea for a while in my head, it's a rather radical idea and might be hard to turn to reality, but still, i'd love to hear other people's thoughts about it.


When you play the game for the first time, you are to create your own lifeform. It might be a small bug, a tree, a new kind of parasite. The sollutions are endless. You completely design the lifeform's DNA (but in a simplified form, like "Animal or Plant", "Predator or not predator", you get the idea). Basically, you can design exactly how your creation looks and reacts on the world.


When you are finished, your creation will see the light in "the world", and along with other people's creations, it will thrive or die. You, as the player, have to tweak your creation's DNA as time goes on. Like if you notice that your animal doesn't need flying, you can remove the trait and thus, save energy (it doesnt have to eat as much). Or if some vegetarian animal is about to eat your plant species to death, you might have to change the DNA. Either, in the offensive way, make your plant poisonous. The defensive way, by making it taste bad or simply not be nourishing enough. Or a win/win situation: Make the plant have seeds all over it, so that any animal that eats it, will not only feed itself, but help the plant to spread and flourish in a wider area. The possibilities are simply endless.

I have to this point, came up with two different game modes. First, the regular one, where each specimen simply wants to survive. And there would be a top-list of some sorts, for the ones that have survived for the longest time. In general, the game would be very slow-paced, so that it maybe only requires you to login a short while once every day or so. Also, when not online, you can use the offline simulator to make smaller changes to your creation, and see how it will affect it's progress, in an offline world populated with other creations you have on your hard-drive. Then, when you havev discovered a great addition to your animal, you simply log on and publish the changes.
The easier-going player might want to create a "samaritan plant", a plant that provides ample food for others, and by being eaten, it easily spreads, while the more hardcore player might find a brutish predator more enjoying. For a more conservative playing style, a sturdy, poisonous plant would be a great choice.

The other mode would simply be a "Deathmatch". Your creation is put to the test in a more fast-paced version of the game, and the sole goal is to kill as many species as possible.
Here, i guess the only thing to choose if you would play seriously, is animal predators. Because of this, some server admins might have to run a few plants, as well as vegetarians in the world (although these would spawn, so they don't die out).

I submitted this idea on another page, and they thought this idea sounded a lot like Spore. I don't think so myself, i'd rather see it as an MMO version of SimLife, but that is a very crude explanation as well.


Well, what do you think?