Hey thank you very much! The agency is definitely abstracted out a layer due to the way the plants follow their own rules, and even when upgrading their characteristics, you really have to know what to look out for when watching the simulation if you want to see the effect that you've had. I agree it could have been clearer for sure, AND, I also wanted to implement a direct form of agency where you were able to specifically click to build walls and place/kill plants, but that was out of scope for the demo.
I was going for a more abstract evolutionary pressure, where the growing number of plants were competing for the limited simulation space, and also the pressure of meeting/beating the increasing simulation reset costs, but the concepts were definitely not as apparent as most other entries in the jam!
In any case, thanks so much for playing it!!