Reminds me of Doodle God and the Grow games, with the spark of some more interesting player agency. It feels like there’s the seed of something bigger here.

I’m really interested in the notion of self-building worlds at the moment, as a framework for self-describing (tutorial-free) games. Clockwork systems with prescribed behaviours/interactions, initially dormant, with many layers for the player to peel back. Set it going and watch, recognize patterns and use them to nudge the system into revealing the next layer.