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Jon Shafer strikes me as a rather serious character - in photos, the 28-year-old designer looks like Woody the Cowboy's dutiful younger brother. For the last few years Shafer's been involved in a rather serious business, too. At Firaxis, he's crammed huge handfuls of human history into the controversial hexes of Civilization 5. Now, freshly incarnated as an indie at the helm of Conifer Games, his own micro-studio, he's holed up in a house in suburban Detroit with a few friends, and he's busy plotting the downfall of Rome.Rome - the last, ugly years of the empire, at least - is the subject of At the Gates, Shafer's latest 4X turn-based strategy game, which breezed past its Kickstarter goal earlier this year, ending up with 265 percent of its funding. Inevitably, At the Gates is more sharply focused than Civilization, but its limited scope makes it fascinating. It's fascinating as a grimy window into a violent period of late antiquity, and it's fascinating as a response to Firaxis' gilded - and occasionally unwieldy - strategy colossus.
"I love difficult challenges to overcome," explains Shafer when I ask how he picks his projects. He could easily be talking about either game. "I like having these big, difficult problems to tackle. Some people might look at me like I was crazy, but it's just something I really enjoy. If there weren't as many challenges to overcome and ground to innovate on, I probably wouldn't be here."
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