Tanya X Short is director of Canadian independent studio Kitfox Games, developers of Shattered Planet and the upcoming Moon Hunters. She's a frequent blogger on Gamasutra.

When we were starting Kitfox and talking to business mentors, we would often receive a lot of conflicting advice. Expert after expert would come in to our studio, look at us or our game, and tell us the exact opposite of what the previous expert said: Go big, go small, aim for quality, fail faster, target an audience, follow your heart, measure retention, think out of the box, and so on and so forth. This eventually inspired 50 Steps to Indie Success.

The Anti-Advice

We survived the ordeal, and continued to ask for advice anyway, even knowing most of it would just be used to fuel confirmation bias. We took some, ignored others, and always appreciated their kindness and gratitude.

We were able to find our inner scrappiness because I started noticing exactly one thing most everyone said. Whether they were in mobile or PC, casual or hardcore, venture capital-funded or starving artist, they all said some variation of:

“Well, you can’t succeed the way I did. That door’s closed now.”

At first, that seemed discouraging, like anti-advice. “Whatever you do, you can’t do what helped me.” But it was actually a pattern, demonstrating that the ones that survived found and took advantage of something before it became a success story. Nobody had done it before. And then it paid off.*

Kitfox has become a studio all about this kind of scrappiness. Efficiency, speed, bravery, flexibility. I could go into detail about our production tools (Kanbanery.com is kinda cool) and tech solutions and IM programs and attitudes on working from home, but... do those really matter, year on year? No.

What matters is why we do the things we do. What matters to us, and how we make our decisions.

So here we go, one studio's practice of scrappiness, as I like to call it.

* Presumably, for each success, 100 others pounced on something and took advantage and it didn’t pay off. I know.

Why "Scrappy"?

To "scrap" means to fight. To claw and kick and scavenge your way to victory, against odds.

As an indie dev, you are David to the world’s many Goliaths, taking a risk because you must. Because just existing is a risk.

There are many ways to increase that risk! Some are under your control and some aren't:

We picked the name Kitfox Games mostly because it’s an appealing animal from where I grew up in southern California (think fennec fox, but Mojave instead of Sahara), but also partly because it is the very picture of an underdog. It’s an adorable little fox making its way in a pretty intense ecosystem.

"Kit Fox", photo by Mark Chappell

A good game isn’t good enough. There are more and more and more games for sale. And in my opinion, more and more of them are good. Whether it’s Steam, PS4, or the App Store, there are more games coming out per month than ever before. Games are easier to make than ever before, and little companies like Kitfox are creating higher-quality games than would be possible for them even five years ago. It’s exciting to me creatively, but it’s terrifying financially.

So, we turn to scrappiness to give us an edge in a crowded space, to help us have extreme flexibility, speed, and therefore survivability.

We’re small, we’re brave, and we’re dedicated to surviving. The competition is strong, but we’re stronger. I’m doing what I can now, today, to make sure that in five or ten years, we’re still here, and thriving. As an aside, if that means I find my definition of "scrappiness" isn't working for me in the future, naturally that means I'll have to change it. 

To ensure our company survives, just in the past year and a half, I’ve helped Kitfox secure multiple kinds of funding. Not only did we ship Shattered Planet on schedule, with high reviews and across all target platforms, but we have received help from venture capitalists, Kickstarter, work-for-hire, and government grants. Not to jinx anything, but due all of our careful striving, Kitfox is financially secure after two years, even if Moon Hunters performs quite under expectations. All of my scrappy discipline has worked fairly well, at least this far, so I hope you can benefit from it too.

What It Really Means to be Scrappy

1. Know your priorities. If you’re a team, everyone should agree to what those are. Scrappiness is knowing what you’re fighting for.
 

Some want to innovate in the art form. Others want a high Steam review score. Many want to sell a million copies. All of us would be thoroughly pleased if all of those things happened, of course, and none are necessarily mutually exclusive. But in the end, if only through their actions, every studio chooses what kind of “success” to pursue.

Whatever resources you do have (free rent, savings, infinite cupcakes, etc) will probably change your priorities, but continuing to exist is often a good one to have towards the top.

Kitfox’s priorities currently* look something like this: