Tanya X. Short

Tanya X. Short is an American video game designer. She is a co-founder of Kitfox Games, an independent video game studio in Montreal, Canada. She was the lead designer for titles including Shattered Planet and Moon Hunters (2016). In 2012, she co-founded the organization Pixelles, which aims to increase gender diversity in video game development.

Early life Short was raised in California, United States. She lived in home that was "in the middle of the desert" so she would often play video games rather than play with other children. Short's mother also disliked "passive entertainment" such as television, so her mother bought the family a Nintendo Entertainment System, feeling as though playing video games is a more "active" activity for the brain. As a teenager, Short would spend her time meeting other people through massively multiplayer online (MMO) games.

Short knew she wanted to work as a video game writer after volunteering her time as a community manager and content designer for an online game. She attended college in Portland, Oregon, to study English literature. In 2006, she applied for the master's degree program in video game design at SMU Guildhall in Texas. designing levels and boss fights for MMORPGs. She moved to Montreal, Canada, in her mid-twenties at the request of her employer, which wanted to take advantage of attractive tax subsidies offered by the province to the video game industry. She participated in meetings held by the Montreal Gaming Society, which Short recalls helped her integrate into the local gaming community even though she did not speak French.

Around 2013, when Funcom halted its activities in Montreal to continue its activities in North Carolina, Short chose to stay in Montreal and became unemployed. As lead designer of the studio's later project Moon Hunters (2016), she was motivated to create a game that used procedural generation to create "personal player narratives." Short later discussed the studio's focus on inclusivity when designing Boyfriend Dungeon (2021), a dungeon crawler game about dating one's weapons, which meant also giving the player options to date women and non-binary characters despite the title of the game.