First, Merged and moved topics to off-topic. Seems more appropriate.
Second: Big. Text. Hurt. Brain.
Very negative connotations.
Third, most of your points are production, ie: not related to game design, ie: you're really jumping the gun here. Horse before the cart and all that. To get you thinking, let me present these points:
1. Enemies will need AI. That means either inventing your own from scratch or somehow adopting existing DB bots. Neither is easy. Darwinbots gives you the perfect testing ground for enemy AI, but you need to be comfortable with it to experiment properly.
2. Shots involve a great deal of geometry. Do you have the necessary mathematics background to know what you're getting yourself in to? Do you know what I'm talking about when I say the words "vector", "dot product", and "cross product"? Or "quadratic formula"?
3. Is this project significantly larger in scope than other projects you've finished in the past? Or worse, is this your first major project? Have you finished the trivial game clone to wet your teeth with? Ie: Tetris clone, pacman clone, pong clone, etc. etc. In general, especially with something as large as game programming/design, the
inventor's paradox does not hold. You must start small and work your way up.
[discouraging rant]
That's it for now. I don't mean to be discouraging, but I've seen a lot of similar projects, and many of my own, crash and burn. It's better to go into this with eyes wide open. It's just way too easy to underestimate the amount of effort it takes to make a game. Any game. Darwinbots is close to 20K lines. That's like the size of a novel. And Darwinbots isn't all that complex, really. A simple version of Darwinbots stripped of almost everything and reduced to a shooter will still probably get you 5K lines of code, which isn't anything to sneeze at. If you haven't done anything more than 200 lines of code before, you're just asking for trouble.
[/discouraging rant]