CEO of Kitfox Games reckons a whole lot of hours taking part in Civilization may very well be the key to the Dwarf Fortress writer’s success: ‘Maybe Kitfox would not be as profitable if I did not know learn how to alternate between science timber and military defences’

Tanya X. Short, CEO of Kitfox video games, can’t recall the identify of the primary PC sport she ever performed. But she definitely remembers the expertise of taking part in it. “It was a step crawler where I’d sit on my dad’s lap. I must have been five or six,” she says. “The thing I remember most is the sounds of the skeletons were so terrifying that I had to run and hide behind the couch.”

Growing up taking part in video games like Side Meier’s Civilization and The Seven Cities of Gold, ultimately Short joined the video games trade as a story designer at Funcom. In 2013 she cofounded Kitfox Games, creating video games like Moon Hunters, Boyfriend Dungeon, and the upcoming open-city “megasim” Streets of Fortuna. “It’s one of those games you could spend your whole life building, and it’ll never be completely complete. It’s just an infinite box of fun to develop,” she says.

Kitfox can also be the writer of Caves of Qud and Dwarf Fortress, which this year celebrates its 20^th anniversary. “We’re gonna be celebrating,” Short says. “All year we’re gonna be reminding people that Dwarf Fortress has been playable for 20 years. Kind of blows my mind.”

Short briefly stopped the bearded party bus to guide me through the subterranean warren of her games library, which took us from the primordial soup of strategy gaming to the cutting edge of interactive fiction.

What game are you currently playing?

I just finished TR-49. It feels like a fresh take on the database game, where you’re exposed to characters but they’re secondary to the gameplay itself, which is just trawling a database. It feels very post Sam Barlow as a design, but it also feels very distinctly Inkle. There’s a playfulness to it and a high concept to it that’s very imaginative.

I don’t think it’s a perfect game, but it’s very impressive that they built it so quickly, because it does have that feeling of focus. Somebody had a vision. It almost feels like a game jam game. It has such a clear, tight focus as a gameplay loop, and then it figures itself out and it’s over, and that’s a wonderful feeling.

I’ll say that’s the opposite of Kitfox’s approach, for better or worse. We are currently all eggs in one giant basket, and I can’t help looking a little wistfully at the wondrous success that Inkle is having with many eggs in many baskets.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

Well, it’s another database game, and I’m sure I’ll be tired of them in 10 years, at least not to play every game. But what’s wonderful about database games is that it gives you the thrill of solving a puzzle, but you can be very self-directed. It’s like a sandbox puzzle, right? And so you get to be expressive as a player. You get to decide for yourself what you’re interested in, what direction you go, and the equivalent of an open-world game.

So, a lot of the pleasures of The Roottrees are Dead are in TR-49 and vice-versa. But [with] The Roottrees are Dead in particular, I do feel like I got to know some characters. That is about characters in a much more direct way.

It almost feels like, after finishing a novel, I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this feeling like, “Oh, I’ll never encounter that character again.” It’s almost like you [grieve a little], right? That’s just a character that’s dead to me now. They had that moment of existing, and now they don’t. And that’s how it is for Roottrees for me.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

Tabletop Simulator was how I, and I guess probably many other people, survived the pandemic. I played a lot of hours of tabletop roleplaying via Tabletop Simulator.

I had uninstalled it a few years ago, but I recently reinstalled it because Kitfox is working on a boardgame prototype with somebody, which we can’t announce anything about. But it did remind me how much it’s just a wonderful, flexible toolset. And I didn’t realise how old it was, but I guess it makes sense. It’s just this timeless place you can go to do what you want to with a table in virtual worlds.

The main [game] we played is actually called Dungeon Crawl Classics. It’s a by-product of Dungeons & Dragons, however it’s channelling the spirit of D&D first version. The wonderful factor about Dungeon Crawl Classics is {that a} committee of designers actually checked out [D&D 1^st edition] and what they had been making an attempt to do, which has been misplaced within the later editions once they made it extra commercially mainstream, is that this sense of imminent demise, this sense of “I’m going to discover the story systemically as we explore the world.”

Dungeon Crawl Classics, a minimum of my expertise of it, is you go in not with a imaginative and prescient of a personality in any respect. You actually roll your character randomly. You have them in entrance of you, now congratulations! You’re a halfling sailor, or no matter. That was actually my character within the final marketing campaign that we did.

You do not are available in with this “Oh, I’m going to build somebody that has this high concept and I’m going to tell my story, and the DM is going to have their story, and they’re going to weave me a—” No, none of that. It’s actually “Here’s the world. You’re this weird person, and you’re together for this reason. OK, now let’s explore it together.”

What is the best variety of hours you’ve got in any given sport, in response to Steam?

Apparently, it’s Brink at 129 hours. I’d play it a lot on Fridays with coworkers back when it was newish, but I think I maybe also left it on over the weekend by accident afterwards. I think I probably spent more actual attentive hours in the following two entries, Civilization 5 at 111 hours and Tabletop Simulator at 105 hours.

Civilization is one of the first PC games that really stole my heart. My first PC game memories are mysterious dungeon crawlers and Seven Cities of Gold. But as a teenager, I could not stop playing Civilization. I actually have a theory of self that is I am a Civilization type personality worker. This is because I am the kind of person that very much enjoys what some people call plate spinning, where I enjoy starting something going that I’ll check in with after a certain amount of time, and in the meantime, I’m going to start another thing spinning.

As a designer, and as a studio head, as a person I am very efficiency oriented. I’m rewarded very much when I realise I’ve done something very efficiently that I haven’t wasted any time or energy or anything like that. And so if I can start one thing going and then do something else, and then, while that’s going do something else and then check in on the first thing, I’m a happy person.

Maybe Civilization made me a better studio head for that. I don’t know. Maybe Kitfox wouldn’t be as successful if I didn’t know how to alternate between science trees and army defences, and that’s interesting.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

Moon Hunters. I’m trying on the key artwork proper now. It’s one in all [my] most-played video games and was Kitfox’s first actual sport. No offence to Shattered Planet, however that was made underneath many, many externally imposed constraints, whereas Moon Hunters sprang pretty totally shaped from my coronary heart and was formed by my group in a method that I do not suppose another group would have made precisely that sport.

I’m very pleased with it, although right here in 2026 it does not learn in the identical method as I believe it did again in 2016—we’re getting in direction of its 10^th anniversary. I believe the requirements for polish in a business undertaking have risen within the final 10 years.

Maybe it is requirements only for studios of Kitfox’s measurement. Maybe if we had been again to 4 individuals, it would not be as totally different. But I do really feel just like the polish degree on the controls and the suggestions, and the best way that we communicated a few of the particulars, I believe can be totally different if we had been to do them now.

I’ll all the time love Moon Hunters. It was my first baby in some methods. But I’m taken with revisiting that world and that perspective of sport.

What’s a chunk of non-gaming software program put in in your PC that you just could not dwell with out?

I mainly dwell out of Notepad. I do use Notepad++ up to date with the newest safety. I haven’t got a Notepad open proper now, however I sometimes do in some unspecified time in the future through the day, and that is a part of my plate-spinning management, Civilization-type process administration. If one thing comes into my mind that I want to try this I can not do proper now, I open a Notepad file. I write it in there after which, in some unspecified time in the future, I’ll discover I’ve a Notepad file open and future Tanya will take care of it.

That’s how I keep away from multitasking. That’s my sizzling productiveness tip.

How tidy is your desktop display screen?

The downside is that my desk is already a catastrophe. So, my digital desktop is definitely a lot cleaner than my bodily desk. That’s why the Notepad works.

It’s fairly tidy. I’ve one row of icons on the left that accumulate when I’m not trying, however it’s 99% empty.