It was Saturday. I had just spent a whole bunch of hours getting basic things set up and working on some art.

I had come up with a basic concept for the main mechanic in my game the day earlier and at this point had some basic code for playing around in a level with it.

The main mechanic I had at that point was a platformer where you had 10 seconds to live but there were door/portal things that would switch the direction of gravity 90 degrees. It was fun to play around with in my test level. But a thought crossed my mind: How am I going to increase the level of challenge through the 10 or so levels I had planned? I mean I could throw in spikes or something, but what else? After a level or two of that might get old. How would I come up with more puzzles and keep the player hooked by having something  fresh every few levels?

The main mechanic needed some tweaking.

I’ve read/heard that if you can’t come up with at least 5 good puzzles that use a mechanic then you should ditch that mechanic.

I had run into this situation; I couldn’t think of any good puzzles beyond one or two. I knew that I needed to change.

Luckily I had been messing around with the concept of the game being on an alien world, and I had come up with a few plant looking sprites. Here’s the concept art that the game was spawn from:

See those purple door like things? They were the door/portal thingy mechanic.

Anyways Luckily I had drawn the green thing next to the purple thing, because I had a brain wave. Why not have the character sprout from the green things and the green things could give the player different elemental properties!!

Immediately I came up with a bunch of different things I could do with that idea. You could have fire or water breathing or … the list went on.

I knew this was a better mechanic.

In the end I’m glad I ditched the other mechanic because the game turned out pretty good. I’m really happy with it at least.

If you haven’t given it a try here’s the link