For example, because it's something I'm hoping to develop, I was made aware of the idea of growing an organic-feeling world using a simple interface from a single character perspective. Then I played Bunni: How We First Met, and found a working example.
A flash game, some of the interesting features included were:
- To grow the game world from just an isolated island containing nothing to a continent with several characters, regenerating resource nodes, harvesting nodes, and harvesters.
- To have placables follow around the protagonist where they can be dragged and dropped (as opposed to having them on hotkeys or dragged from off-window).
- To have a constant off-screen arrow display to make you aware of the position of important pieces.
- To have threats show up where certain negative events occur.
- To make the focus of the game to establish a balance of consumption versus production while having a simple accumulation model like a standard RTS.
That said, I'm not going to make the same game. It's going to be predominantly a Sci-Fi Action RPG, not a game about bunnies. I'm setting the bar slightly higher in that I want the persona that the player plays to actually have a place in a more robust conflict resolution setting. I'm going to allow multiple players on the same map. The resource model is going to be a little different in that I'm going for a less personal accumulation focus (because that's been done to death) and instead implement more of a communal accumulation. So the similarities between the two games would be vague at best.
However, the one major thing I'm going to take from it is idea of simply placing things and watching them grow. Seeing a finished model makes working on my vehicle game over the weekend that much easier.