Volition - Living alien planet

For the past 6 months I've been working on a game for a school project, and these are some of the concepts I made for the environment.
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THE GAME CONCEPT:
The game is set on an alien planet which, as the player finds out by playing, is one giant living organism. The player crashes on the planet and their initial task is to find out what happened to the previous research crew that was sent to the planet. Whilst looking for clues about the crew, the player finds out that they couldn't get off the planet because their ship broke. In order to repair it, they would've needed to extract vital chemicals from the planet's blood. This would cause the planet to die. The crew made the choice to sacrifice themselves in order to save the planet, and now the player has to make that same choice: Sacrifice yourself in order to save the planet but not give the families of the crew any closure on what happened to them, or leave the planet by repairing the crew's ship and therefore killing the planet, which would mean the crew's sacrifice was for nothing.
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THE PLANET'S BIOLOGY AND BACKSTORY:
The planet was once a normal rocky planet as we know it, on which a small organism came to life. This organism had no predators and could reproduce and grow without any interference, until eventually it covered the entire planet surface.

The now planet sized organism had a silhouette resembling a sea urchin, with pillars sticking out in every direction. These pillars seemed to have a stone exterior, like an almost scaly skin, and an interior that looked like flesh.

Inside of some of these pillars were the organs of the planet, protected by it's hard outer skin. However, it's lungs and 'mouth' weren't hidden inside of these pillars, but were located way down at the center of the planet.

You could feel a wind going up and down the pillars, in a rhythm that shares a familiarity with our breathing. Once in a while, there would be a very strong wind downwards around a few pillars. This wind would be so strong, all of the plants and other organisms living on the planet would be pulled off and sucked towards the center of the planet. This is how it fed itself. After feeding, you could see a steaming hot slime seeping out some holes in the pillars. Once this slime cooled down, the plants and organisms living on the pillars would feed on this slime, closing the food chain.

I won't go into (more) detail about the planet's biology as that'd take a few pages i'm afraid (;