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I just got The Unfinished Swan and finished it (heh) a few days ago, and came to the realization that there's a certain class of gameplay mechanic that I really like.

It's games where you are somehow filling in, completing, or otherwise satisfying something in the environment to make progress.  For example, in The Unfinished Swan, painting the environment so you can see it and find your way through it.  Or Flower, where you fly over all of the flowers or other structures to light them up.  Or Pixeljunk Eden, where you release pollen to fill in flowers to so they grow more vines that you can jump on to progress.  Or American McGee's Grimm, where a sphere of influence around you turns everything it touches evil.  And in any game with an automap, my favorite part is always the satisfaction of filling in the map as I go.

Anyone else love this game mechanic, and are there any other games I should check out?

Wizball.
Some guy made a pretty swell remake:
http://retrospec.sgn.net/game-overview.php?link=wizball
There are a million old arcade games like Qix.

I really, really love games like this too. Hearing that Unfinished Swan is like this makes me interested!

Soulblazer is a good fit for this mold. Each world (except the last) starts you with an empty plain, and killing monsters in the dungeon causes the town to be reassembled. It's simple and linear but very enjoyable.

Dark Cloud 1 and 2 (aka Dark Chronicle) has you explore dungeons for little people or recipes for buildings to rebuild each town. This is paired with a minigame to try and assemble the town the "proper" way to successfully clear an area.

Actraiser is a little like this, but is more like a sim game. It's still fun to see the world go from empty to civilized over time.

InFamous (maybe inFamous 2?) starts you with a ruined but inhabited city. As you complete quests and story events, you slowly restore power to the city, reinstate services like trains, and then create order as you put areas under your influence. It's fun watching the city go from a disheveled mess to a clean, restored area as you progress.

Terranigma, Soulblazer's eventual sequel, has a tiny bit of this in the early game, but then it's forgotten in favor of a couple weak event-oriented advancement games.

okami  :whome:

Small Worlds (http://armorgames.com/play/4850/small-worlds) uses this mechanic to beautiful effect.  I don't want to describe it here because it's so short and I feel like I'd be ruining the surprise, but it's a spectacular little vignette.

Dark Cloud was the first that came to mind, second was Fifth's BirdyWorld.  Hard to play now, though, since it requires multiple players to completely fill out the world.

He is working on a sequel though.

haven't played Dark Cloud but that sounds kinda similar to Legend of Mana.

at the beginning you get an artifact and it's used to place on the world map and it generates a town. then you complete a quest in said town and you get another one, and the process repeats until you filled up and complete the world.

though I don't think it's exactly what you're looking for OP. but it's a cool game and semi-related so I felt it worth mentioning.

legend of mana is cooler than dark cloud (dark cloud is still cool) but dark cloud has more of the "filling the world" part

Waking Mars, man. So chilling and cool. Amazing atmosphere, amazing voice acting.

In Dark Cloud 2 you rebuild the origin points of some areas and you then go 100 years into the future to see what has developed there, even if the system is simple it's quite cool and rewards for restoring each place in 100%.

Dang it, I was thinking about that!

gotta make all the trees bloom

Shameless self advertisement. I love that mechanic myself and am actually making a small game based on that idea. Except you are populating a world with sound sources.

(http://i.imgur.com/HVPPc.png?2) (http://imgur.com/HVPPc)

http://soundcloud.com/johannesgunnar/s-experiments-2012-11-17
and here's an example of how it can sound like currently.

Jesus, that's fantastic!  This is exactly the kind of game I like, and it was done very well.

This looks really interesting!  Looking forward to your progress on this.

Ah, that's pretty close to what I'm talking about.  I played a ways into Waking Mars on my iPad, but the interface was a little awkward.  I have it on PC now, and liking the controls better.

Regarding the town-building games like Dark Cloud, etc., that's not quite the kind of thing I'm going for.  But those are some good games.  I had fun with Dark Cloud, and I do need to play the Soul Blazer series sometime (I missed those somehow back in my SNES days).

I had forgotten about Okami (had it on my PS2).  I've been meaning to try it on Wii.  And BirdyWorld looked like an interesting project.

etrian odyssey. you are a cartographer drawing your own map as you go further and further into a dungeon

you have to like old crpgs though, it's not for everyone

Yeah, I'm not sure if I'd be into that or not.  Really interesting having the player draw their own maps, though.  I haven't seen that before.

The DS Zelda games (Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks) also used drawing a map as a puzzle element. Usually you got a partially completed map, missing key elements like pits or switches, so it effectively functioned as the pages from the back of the manual most gamers never actually used for notes, except now you used them. Then you'd periodically come across a level with no map, and filling out the map usually gave you a surprise, like finding out the island is shaped like a whale (and the eye hides the cave entrance).

Spirit Tracks had a thing going on where you reveal new sections of track as the game progresses, allowing you to reach new places or unlocking shortcuts, but that seems like it might not be quite your goal.