This week on a Thanksgiving/Black Friday edition of the podcast, Jon Shafer from Conifer Games joined me to talk about turn based strategy design and how it applies to his current project: At the Gates.
Because Jon was the lead designer on Civilization Five, we began our talk on turn based strategy framing on the recent release of Civilization Beyond Earth. Discussing some of the issues we had with the design of it and how those problems are being dealt with in At the Gates.
After that we caught up talking specifically about the work Jon has done on At the Gates since we last spoke almost a year ago. I asked about the recent clans system that gives units both personality and storytelling opportunities and what is going to hopefully make At the Gates a winner. We ended talking about Jon’s pick for his game of the year which turned out to be The Binding of Isaac Rebirth.
Talking to Jon about design is always great and this was a cast where we could have easily spent 3+ hours on , unfortunately Jon had company coming and we had to wrap up.
- Here is the link to the At The Gates site where you can pre-order it now and get into the alpha
- And for more from Jon, here is his twitter link
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS
