Jon Shafer

Lead designer and principal gameplay programmer for Civilization 5 and At the Gates. Owner & CEO of Conifer Games. Fortune favors the bold.

[Jon Shafer @JonShaferDesign]

@ivanassen Yeah, "fragmentation" is probably not the best term to describe it. We're in some kind of transition period where it makes business sense to support both 2013 and 2020 consoles, which of course is causing a lot of headaches.

[Jon Shafer @JonShaferDesign]

A pretty conservative upgrade for the Switch makes sense, boring as it is. Hardware fragmentation is a big reason why Cyberpunk 2077 had so many problems at release. A bigger jump in performance = more problems devs have to solve.

[Jon Shafer @JonShaferDesign]

@ElectricPineAve @Surviving_PDX Replaced my previous tweet, which I reread and seemed more suggestive of bad actors than I intended!

[Jon Shafer @JonShaferDesign]

@ElectricPineAve @Surviving_PDX Yeah, back to normal. There was also no corresponding spike in reviews, suggesting these weren't "real" players. Could be Steam trading card farming. They're apparently worth $. That was the cause of unusual player spikes I've seen with a couple other obscure games.

[Jon Shafer @JonShaferDesign]

@HoegLaw Congrats on 500, Rick! Loved hearing about the show's history.

[Jon Shafer @JonShaferDesign]

@ElectricPineAve Good catch!

[Jon Shafer @JonShaferDesign]

@eldrone Maybe so! I'm looking forward to seeing what they're up to.

[Jon Shafer @JonShaferDesign]

This seems right. Really makes you think about how much has changed in games over the past 10 years.

[One Proud Bavarian @ProudBavaria]

One thing we have to realise at this point is the fact that Singleplayer TES games are basically a dead franchise rather than it just being in hibernation.

It'll be 5 months until 10 years have passed since Skyrim released. TES VI will be a revival attempt, not a continuation.

[Jon Shafer @JonShaferDesign]

@eldrone Yep, but they started work on it a long, long time ago. Big game business thinking has changed significantly over the past 5 years and has become hyper-focused on player retention and monetization over time. He who sows the cosmetic horse armor must reap the whirlwind!

[Jon Shafer @JonShaferDesign]

@eldrone I do think we'll see ES6 eventually, especially now that Bethesda is owned by Microsoft, but it might be a while and it's anyone's guess what form it will take. Can't just do Skyrim again with new art.

[Jon Shafer @JonShaferDesign]

@eldrone There's a lot of pressure to turn everything into a live-service game, especially at the giant public corporation level. Open world RPGs are expensive and don't have the upside of a multiplayer action game.

[Jon Shafer @JonShaferDesign]

@AndreeaChifu In my experience: the starter. Having access to opportunities is just so, so important.

[Jon Shafer @JonShaferDesign]

@RepswalS Not everything worked out in the end, but I do think I was onto something given the huge extent to which the strategy genre has shifted towards a character/narrative focus over the past decade. Wish I'd had a bigger team to flesh out the idea!

[Jon Shafer @JonShaferDesign]

As both a designer and big roguelike (roguelite?!) fan going back to 2010-ish I loved this thought-provoking PC Gamer article on the debate over the term “roguelike”. Lots of great articles about games have been written this past year!

[PC Gamer @pcgamer]

Why the roguelike community is so concerned about the definition of 'roguelike'. https://t.co/ooV9pDEHsI

[Jon Shafer @JonShaferDesign]

@RepswalS AtG's original 2012 design actually didn't include clans so this was a huge design shift. I came up with most of the design on the fly rather than drawing inspiration from specific games. Much of that work was bottom-up, just plugging things together and seeing what was fun.

[Jon Shafer @JonShaferDesign]

Been replaying Mario Galaxy on the Switch and I’m still impressed by the creative environment design. The camera is more of a struggle than I remember and it's often impossible to get a feel for a level's layout from a distance but I love the ambition.