What are your thoughts on design of single player turn based/"non-action" games as opposed to action games? Any tips for designing the former?
Maybe it's just my personal bias but I've just been thinking lately about how action games seem to be so much easier to make (especially to make fun), for example Doom enemies and weapons are all super simple, outright primitive and yet it's so easy to make countless fun stages out of those setpieces as the huge library of player made WADs shows, or games like Super Meat Boy and Celeste, every time new mechanic is introduced tens of new varied levels pop up just placing elements in various configurations, even very minimal action game like Asteroids is relatively fun for how little it has, meanwhile the turn based equivalent of that minimalism would be something like... lvl 3 pokemon and lvl 5 pokemon taking turns using tackle on one another? Even huge well regarded roguelikes like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup or Brogue struggle with making the first few floors fun and varied, is it just the inherent feature of this type of game?
could it be that you're thinking of minimalism in the wrong terms? i don't play a lot of true roguelikes, but i think the pleasure in something like xcom is in looking at a large, complex game state with many actors and trying to determine what will happen next and how i can influence it best. the classic "lessons learned the hard way" page on nethack wiki is of this flavour when it's not about battling the UI -- arcane interactions between mechanics that require the player to have both knowledge and theory
so maybe a minimalist approach that tries to really drill down to just this notion would be something like chess puzzles -- remove all the normal context, the campaign, the bloody sokoban level -- show the player a "snapshot" of the game and ask them to make the best move (or perhaps even just to predict what happens assuming ideal play). dude... chess puzzles are kinda like wads, dude -- though the problem with this of course is that most turn-based games have some degree of random variance
designing for this would require walking a fine line when it comes time to decide what units can and can't do -- particularly how much "reach" they have and how many interactions the player has to think about at once. but this sort of thing isn't my forte, just a thought
