A trip to Iceland prevented me from posting last week, so I’ll take this chance to remind people that watch this space that we did a Classic Game Analysis of Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander with Chris Taylor from Gas Powered Games. The conversation, naturally, turned to his struggling Kickstarter, and Rob wrote a great summary of the studio’s situation, recently.

You can listen to that show directly from here, and discuss it here.

Today, we uploaded our conversation with our good friend Jon Shafer. Though the show topic was map evolution, since the topic was inspired by his new game, At the Gateswe ended up talking a lot about it. His Kickstarter, with a more modest goal than Taylor’s, is going to be a success, in all likelihood.

You can listen to Episode 204 here, and discuss it on the Idle Thumbs forum here.

I get a lot of Kickstarter emails and requests – many from people with good ideas or interesting ideas – but we are not a Kickstarter podcast and don’t want to be a place that just promotes “maybe this will get finished” games. In these cases, of course, the developers have track records that demonstrate they can deliver a product, and both are fascinating people for other reasons than the fact they are Kickstarting stuff. (Taylor has long been one of my favorite devs to watch give a speech, and Shafer – a frequent guest, often at the last minute – will be guaranteed our support in one way or another just like Vic Davis will always be invited to talk about his new games. 3MA has a corporate culture of its own.)

So don’t expect us to do a lot more Kickstarter shows unless we know the developer or have easy access to them and there is a hook for a good show.

In any case, they were great conversations and I encourage you to listen to them.

(Shafer’s show sort of breaks my conflict rules since my company played a small part in the promotion of his announcement by doing a mass mailing and some editing for him, but I am more contaminated by being his friend than by being someone that will see a very tiny amount of money funneled my way. Consider this a disclaimer.)