I built a similar alife simulation but as a Quake 2 mod using the monsters as the agents and plants and stuff with neural nets and genetic algorithms. My piece was titled "Ecosystem: Constructing a simple self-perpetuating society of adaptable agents" [1].
This was 2003, not for school but for fun. I submitted it for an ai writing comp on ai-depot.com but the comp failed for lack of entries. I have some pics on a repo backup of the project [2].