Re: Earwax
@50
For what it's worth, Chrono Trigger and basically anything else put out by Square has incredibly simplistic mechanics. in fact it's hard (not impossible, but hard) to find sighted turn-based RPGs which don't boil down to hit your best spell for all of combat. I haven't played A Hero's Call personally and don't plan to because I have no interest in simple combat, but if you think that all these sighted games that have done it have more complicated combat than Entombed--they don't.
Every once in a while there's something like Slay The Spire with deep mechanics, or one or another rpg that lets you move your characters around as well for position, or something else that adds depth. When it comes to turn-based combat the sighted side of the grass is most definitely not greener. In general there's only so many places to put difficulty, and one of the worst ones for player retention is complicated math for combat stuff: but if the combat is entirely turn based, there's not much else to do for depth. Infinitely long turns but really deep mechanics is a very niche audience--I suspect this is why Slay The Spire isn't a huge thing outside very specific circles, and Slay The Spire only pulls it off by having a particularly odd dynamic where your run through the game is 15 minutes once you've learned how to play it (thus limiting how far you have to think ahead).
But I don't care whether you do turn-based combat. I don't think you'll succeed at making it fun to me, because lots and lots of sighted devs have tried over the years, and none of them have really figured out complexity without adding some sort of realtime element to apply pressure, or essentially going as far as saying "it's realtime but you can pause the world whenever". And unless you have something really creative in mind I don't think you'll get what you want out of it when it's done, either. As far as I can tell, turn-based being a big thing was just that computers used to only be able to do that and not much else. But it's your project, my point was merely pointing out that it sounded like you were choosing to do that for the wrong reasons and as if you thought there was some inherent choice between immersive storytelling and realtime combat.
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