What I've Learned About Game Design From Scratch

I've made a bunch of different games on Scratch, with varying degrees of success. I've noticed a few things about my games that have been successful, which is the topic of this post. 

1. A normal game but with a twist. 

One way to make a good game is to take a very basic idea and then change something about it. For example, my game Volcano Hero started out as a really simple, basic game. Coins fall from the top of the screen and you have to grab them. There are lots of games like this, and they all have one thing in common. They're more boring than watching paint dry. However, Volcano Hero met with pretty good success when it was released. Why? Because I changed something in the gameplay that made it different from all the other coin-grabbers. The ground underneath you falls away, and if you aren't careful where you land you'll be hurt. People liked this new challenge, thus Volcano Hero's success. 

2. Theme

Another one of my games, The Dead of Winter, also met with pretty good success, except it's different from Volcano Hero. It doesn't have very unusual gameplay, it's a simple hack n' slash survival game against hordes of enemies. You grab new weapons as you go, and that's about it, yet it also met with decent success. I think it is because of the graphics and the colors I chose to be the most prominent in the game. I made this for a competition where my game had to reflect the word "Frozen" in its graphics. Thus, the game is pretty much all blue and ice. The enemies are blue, the background is bluish-white, the weapons and the player all have icicles hanging off them, the buttons have icicles hanging off them, snowy mountains are in the background, blue clouds soar across the sky, etc. I think people like how the game can be summed up as winter or ice. Volcano Hero also reflects this, because everything in it is orange or gray, because of the volcano.