This was a really lovely read! I think your approach to designing games is totally valid. Something I noticed about your games is they often (In my opinion) have very cohesive tones and very strong aethetics, and I think your approach lends to that result very well!
There's a game design framework I learned about called the MDA Framework, and while it's not the end-all-be-all it can be a useful tool for breaking down a game during design and examining if its constituent pieces lends towards creating the desired experience. The acronym stands for:
- "Mechanics": the literal nuts and bolts of how the games works, each individual rule, etc.
- "Design": the kind of "run-time behavior" of how mechanics work together and how the player interacts with the rules.
- "Aesthetics": the emotional affect invoked in the player.
And the three components are ordered in that way. As a designer you define the mechanics that create the dynamics that invoke an aesthetic emotion from the player. For a player it works backwards, they experience the game through aesthetics that emerge from the dynamics that result from the mechanics of the game. But as a designer it's useful to think about that flow from both directions. For example you can start with a mechanic "The player have exactly 10 rounds to build a city" which can result in the dynamic "games often end well before players can build everything they want to" which can result in the aesthetic "you can't have it all and have to make careful choices and sacrifices to build the best city you can". But you can also work backwards! The desired aesthetic "players must work together to topple a tyrannical empire" can be accomplished by the dynamics "players have to coordinate to pull off feats that they couldn't do alone" and by identifying that you can then design mechanics to meet that goal (e.g. "players only have 3 actions each turn" and "goals often require 4 or more actions, always more than a single player can perform").
But I think most importantly, it sounds like you've found a design process that inspires you and keeps you motivated, which is worth its metaphorical weight in gold as far as I'm concerned!