As a game developer, your goal will always be to create new interesting games, but as we can learn from other game developers' success stories, a successful game is always a mix of novelty and familiarity. If you think about most of the games available today, you can clearly see how each of them is an iteration of an older game or well know mechanics. Very few games are completely new and with never-seen-before core mechanics.
In fact, your role as a game designer is not to invent a completely new set of mechanics every time, but to pick a set that works well with the game you're making. Using existing mechanics, refining well-known concepts, and falling back on clichéd settings is totally fine (if you think about ...
