Next stop, Surviball. You can find this awesome game at http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/Community/topics.php?forum=1048&app_id=48.
This game kind of looks a bit like the old Marble Madness. Your goal there is to move a marble through a parcour filled with obstacles, ramps, and enemies. In Surviball, you have to direct a marble over a difficult course filled with tiles that give your marble a good speed boost, when sometimes that is not what you need at that very moment.
When you play Surviball, try to pay attention to the controls and the graphical effects.
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Ok, what did you notice? Maybe this rotating start effect, which is pretty simple to archive but visually very intense. Or the control scheme. By pressing the cursor keys on your keyboard, the marble speeds up. So you have to take the current speed into account when it comes to directing your marble in the required direction. Another thing is that the play field is assembled by a lot of repeating small tiles, each with a different functionality. Also, there is a timer, which gives the player some pressure to reach the goal in the given time frame.
Again, let's list some of the features of Surviball that we have discovered:
Rotation star effect
Indirect control scheme of the marble
Playfield assembled via small tiles with different functionality
Game timer
Like we have seen already, when you play other developers' games, you should study them. Look at how graphics are used, how the control scheme is set up, and so on. Find out how the player gets rewarded and what makes the player go on and play further.
Of course, have fun with the games, but also analyze them to learn how things could be done. Take inspiration from them and also take the motivation you get from this for your own projects. There is nothing wrong with taking existing ideas and reusing them. Why reinvent the wheel when someone is already driving the car with it! I don't mean shamelessly copy other games, but take a proven concept, enhance it, and put your own stamp on it.