CEO of Kitfox Games reckons hundreds of hours playing Civilization could be the secret to the Dwarf Fortress publisher's success: 'Maybe Kitfox wouldn't be as successful if I didn't know how to alternate between science trees and army defences'

Tanya X. Short, CEO of Kitfox games, cannot recall the name of the first PC game she ever played. But she certainly remembers the experience of playing 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 playing games like Side Meier's Civilization and The Seven Cities of Gold, eventually Short joined the games industry as a narrative designer at Funcom. In 2013 she cofounded Kitfox Games, developing 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 is also the publisher 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 spinoff of Dungeons & Dragons, but it's channelling the spirit of D&D first edition. The amazing thing about Dungeon Crawl Classics is that a committee of designers really looked at [D&D 1^st edition] and what they were trying to do, which has been lost in the later editions when they made it more commercially mainstream, is this sense of imminent death, this sense of "I'm going to discover the story systemically as we explore the world."

Dungeon Crawl Classics, at least my experience of it, is you go in not with a vision of a character at all. You really roll your character randomly. You have them in front of you, now congratulations! You're a halfling sailor, or whatever. That was literally my character in the last campaign that we did.

You don't come 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 really "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 highest number of hours you have in any given game, according 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 looking at the key art right now. It's one of [my] most-played games and was Kitfox's first real game. No offence to Shattered Planet, but that was made under many, many externally imposed constraints, whereas Moon Hunters sprang fairly fully formed from my heart and was shaped by my team in a way that I don't think any other team would have made exactly that game.

I'm very proud of it, even though here in 2026 it doesn't read in the same way as I think it did back in 2016—we're getting towards its 10^th anniversary. I think the standards for polish in a commercial project have risen in the last 10 years.

Maybe it's standards just for studios of Kitfox's size. Maybe if we were back to four people, it wouldn't be as different. But I do feel like the polish level on the controls and the feedback, and the way that we communicated some of the details, I think would be different if we were to do them now.

I will always love Moon Hunters. It was my first child in some ways. But I am interested in revisiting that world and that perspective of game.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

I basically live out of Notepad. I do use Notepad++ updated with the latest security. I don't have a Notepad open right now, but I typically do at some point during the day, and this is part of my plate-spinning leadership, Civilization-type task management. If something comes into my brain that I need to do that I can't do right now, I open a Notepad file. I write it in there and then, at some point, I'll notice I have a Notepad file open and future Tanya will deal with it.

That's how I avoid multitasking. That's my hot productivity tip.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

The problem is that my desk is already a disaster. So, my digital desktop is actually much cleaner than my physical desk. That's why the Notepad works.

It's pretty tidy. I have one row of icons on the left that accumulate when I'm not looking, but it's 99% empty.