*blinks* A LOT of posts. Infact, I think this topic is more active than the Spore topic.
As for the game, I would also suggest no stages. We would risk turning the game into a series of minigames, which I think we should avoid.
That's a brilliant idea. I have a minor suggestion to go along with it; playability is key. You can't hammer in features before the game is playable, so the "no stage" idea works perfectly.
Start out controlling a single creature, and have the ability eventually to gather others with you (and lead over them) or even follow another one (if you're really bored with normal AI *grin*). Once your group gets somewhat big, you could
also control them RTS style, if that's the way you want to go with the game. It'd be really neat if you could go back to controlling one, too, and watch your group from afar.
It feels more natural this way, rather than having direct stages. Isn't 'natural' the concept? Hehe.
But as Zemat said, some focus should probably be maintained on progressive stages. How do you start? How will the game play in its simplest form? What should the first 'playable' demo be like? Those are interesting questions to ask yourself.
I'd consider supporting multi-tile creatures. On the other hand, moving a tribe of them would me a horrible exercise in logistics, and it wouldn't feel right. So you could make everything else smaller while your creature still takes up one space? That doesn't sound right either, because you can't go smaller than one tile.
I had no problem with the directed evolution, in fact I like the idea of designing a creature from the beginning and thinking of ways to adapt to what's going on around you. We might do something like Pandemic 2, where you actually have to pay DNA points to remove a trait and you can gain a few traits at random that might be undesirable.
Hm, so the paths here are A) Directed evolution with random mutations or B) Uncontrolled evolution. Might I propose a compromise if this decision splits the community?
C) Your first creature has uncontrolled evolution. If it reaches the space age, your next creatures have directed evolution (optionally) as your space-age race could be said to be controlling their progression.
Just an interesting meta-gaming thing. It also has a DF-inspired concept of past decisions affecting future outcomes. Ah, well; food for thought.
(Edit) Stackless Python is fascinating. That's how threads should be done, I think.