Through the Lens: Video Games - Game Design Theory - page 105

Waiting for Animations
In a turn-based game, making the player wait for animations to play out
is a problem. This is very low-hanging fruit that can be fixed easily if you
understand the issue, so I've put it first You see, in a real-time game,
animations have a gameplay meaning. No one is waiting around while an
animation plays out in Street Fighter or Call of Duty . In real-time games,
the time it takes to perform a particular move is a crucially important
part of how that action is balanced in the game. A move is commonly
very strong but balanced out by a long cooldown or reload—a delay.
In turn-based games, however, animation does not have any game-
play meaning: it just makes the player wait while a little movie plays out.
This may have reached a peak of awfulness for Final Fantasy XIII , in
which the various spells you cast resulted in cutscenes that lasted min-
utes and couldn't be skipped. But even in smaller doses, this problem
gets bad quickly. Let's say there's a one-second animation every time you
issue a command. If you're pretty good at a game, you might play rather
quickly. Let's say you issue a command every 2 seconds. That means that
if you play a game for one hour, you've actually spent 40 minutes playing
(issuing commands) and 20 minutes sitting and waiting for animations
to play out. Those seconds add up!
Here's what you, the game designer, must do: if you need to have
animation at all (and there's often no good reason), decouple it from
the player's input. That way, if an animation isn't finished and a play-
er performs another action the animation will either be interrupted or
will continue to play out while allowing the player to do something else.
Asynchronous animation might be another way of putting it.
Elegance Still Counts
It seems that many designers spend every drop of UI improvement they
get from making games turn-based on making many of these games
as complicated as possible. Heroes of Might & Magic gets a very low
score for efficiency, having some seven different kinds of resources that
are needed to produce things. Further, the effectiveness of a particular
unit was extremely hard to determine due to stacking . For instance, an
individual skeleton might be a rather weak creature, but it's very hard
to gauge how tough they are collectively if there's a stack with 117 of
them.
Advance Wars is a good example of a clean, elegant design (par-
ticularly the first Game Boy Advance release and the later reboot Days
of Ruin for the DS). There are maybe ten different unit types and each
has its own special role—and that's it. The game is very simply about