Don't Fall in Love With a Mechanic

No, I don't mean that you shouldn't develop romantic feelings for a person who fixes things for a living. (My mother did that, and I turned out just fine.) No, I mean that when you're designing a game, you shouldn't get too emotionally attached to a game mechanic.

Finished games seldom look like the designer originally intended - things change over time, things you thought would be fun turned out not to be, things that you didn't think would be fun turn out to be the best part of the game, etc.  I've seen many a game ruined because the designers came up with a mechanic that sounded good on paper, but wasn't actually all that interesting once implemented, and yet the developers refused to take it out.

For instance, remember Yoshi's Island DS?  The game that took the original Yoshi's Island concept and then said "hey, what if baby versions of other Mario characters could sit on Yoshi's back, and they each had a different power? And then sometimes you had to switch back and forth?"  Turns out that wasn't a very fun game mechanic!  The "powers" felt incredibly forced (Wario's involved coins, Peach's involved umbrellas, and I don't even remember Luigi's...) and having to backtrack and switch characters over and over is never fun (see also: Banjo Tooie, Donkey Kong 64).  The original Yoshi's Island didn't need it, and it's a concept that should have been nixed in development, but for whatever reason (perhaps publisher's insistence?), the developers left it in, and the game is poorer because of it.

And so it happened with the sokoban I'm working on.  I had this idea that in every room, you'd have to get to a "star wand", which would then eliminate all the star blocks in the room.  The idea being that you'd solve the room one way to get to the wand, and then solve it in a different way to get from the wand to the exit.  Sounds good in paper, but when I started designing levels, I found that in most rooms it was just adding unnecessary steps to finish the room.  So I'm either removing it, or at the very least only implementing it in very specific rooms that actually benefit the idea.  It may mean I need to call the game something other then "star wand", though.