Indie developers, I’ve found, have started to throw themselves into predictable patterns a lot of the time. They take a nostalgic concept, throw in a few tweaks, add another traditional genre to the mix, and a game concept suddenly emerges. Even so, they tend to work within already existing categories, adding bits and pieces of traditional approaches that already work. Like mixing chocolate and peanut butter, or building your house on a rock rather than sand, it tends to work out better than the alternative.