I thought I'd give pyglet a crack as I've used pygame a fair bit for mucking around with this sort of thing. Initial impressions were strong, although I have a feeling I'm going to need to revise my OpenGL...

git repo created at https://github.com/hobbitalastair/pyweek29

The concept at this stage is that the player controls a butterfly that can shade areas of the map. By doing so it helps/hinders the plants growing in that location. If the system is somewhat unstable this could mean that the player is indirectly balancing different plant types. To actually "win" I guess some kind of time based survival mechanism might come into play??

Today I spent a few hours pulling together the prototype thermal mechanics. There are now two plant varieties that spawn and may potentially die off. However, I'm not sure how to turn this into an actual game... despite some time spent fiddling with the constants tuning it so that the butterfly has a significant effect and the plants have a useful behavior appears rather tricky.

I still have some time tomorrow, so I'll see what ideas I can come up with that might be useful. Lessons learnt from this - I have a tendency to try to make things with ill-defined or overly complex mechanics, and maybe something easier to nail down would be better?