A step back

I've been delving into basic systems a lot lately, trying to work out how they will interact and behave on a massive scale. This has made me lose some of my focus on the overall vision of what I want to accomplish. In trying to meticulously design the building blocks of Flat Galaxy and apply them to a hypothetical, fully-realized model, I have stepped toward the dangerous world of simulation, a world which will force me to develop something that will take far more time and resources than I can dedicate.

I need to take a breath and reiterate (to myself) what I'm attempting to do. My ultimate goal is to have a set of hierarchical, layered systems-within-systems. I want one level to have an effect on the next level up, and so on. I want to create as little "special" programming as possible. Instead, I want to create a set of rules and objects governed by those rules which together can develop more complicated systems on their own, and even new rules, without "designer oversight." In short, I want to create a procedural natural ecosystem which can tend towards order in the short term. This means both the agents and their environment are linked at a very basic level. Everything should be interactive, from plants to planets. In order to build this type of system, there are basic rules that must be established between these two classes of interactivity.

Regarding agents:

1. Biological systems will strive to keep their health at an optimal level.
2. Biological systems will strive to make their functions as efficient as possible.
3. Biological systems will attempt to reproduce.

Regarding the environment:

1. Non-biological systems can be created randomly or by biological systems.
2. Non-biological systems should arise naturally via the interaction of other non-biological systems.

In taking a step back, I am setting some guidelines for myself. My original intention was not to write any code for at least a month or two, but I am finding that more and more difficult as I cannot keep track of every potentially viable scenario without doing some code testing, and writing out pseudo code tests in a notebook is really tedious and frustrating. So I will allow myself to write code, but I will only do so when I have to and I will limit the scope of my tests as much as I can, for now. 

Which leads me to my second guideline, which is that I'm going to start by attempting to develop a very simple model on which I can build, but a model which attempts to incorporate in one fashion or another every important mechanic. I've spent far too much brain energy visualizing scenarios involving actual users and their myriad interactions with themselves and the model, and it's just overwhelming. I'm going to zoom up and focus on a simple AI-driven model which will give me an indication of what direction to go in as I develop more complicated systems.