Why The Chill Fox Developer Is Pushing Their Game Out In Two Months

For a lot of new developers, you might have this romantic idea of slaving away at your dream project for the better chunk of a decade. After all, once your masterpiece is out the door, everyone will see it was worth the wait, right? Clearly, anything with a long development time is inherently Silksong-like in its anticipation and quality. 

Of course, once you've actually had a taste of the industry, you might see things differently. Chill Fox developer Irfan definitely thinks so. Speaking at IGDX, the Petit Island dev talked about how their crazy vulpine stealth sandbox was put together in two months- and their plan to keep working on it after launch. 

"We did it because first I need to see the response from the market", he explains. "After two months, you can see quickly the market response". 

It's not that they're pushing out a game early as some sort of cash grab- Irfan explained that Chill Fox is a game the developers really wanted to make. But at the end of the day, it was about managing the developer's efforts, and the best way to see that is to see how many people actually buy in to the adventures of a fox sneaking around a farm hunting chickens. 

"The reason why we developed the game in two months is because actually we are planning to have a bigger scope to be the next Goat Simulator. But you know, Goat Simulator is a big game. It takes a lot of resources, money, and time", he says. 

"We don't have that for now. So that's why we made a smaller version of it. And we're going to release this small version. And if the market response is good, then we're going to continue developing. Because if the game sells well, we have more money to grow the game or continue developing".

Making Chill Fox With The Audience 

When I brought up the romantic ideal of simply making the game you want to make, Irfan reminded me that romanticism doesn't pay bills. But more importantly, it also helps to always be checking for what your audience's tastes actually are. 

That doesn't mean his heart is stone, etiher: to Irfan, this kind of communicative development is its own kind of romance. 

"I think a lot of people forget that you make games not only for yourself, right? Okay, maybe for you the game is nice, but we need to understand also a lot of people out there, maybe they have different opinions or they have different styles", he says. "So if you want to reach the biggest market as possible, you need to test it in public. Like going to a game show like this and let everyone play your game and take their feedback and improve the game. So it's like you're developing the game with your audience".

This kind of pragmatism is always nice to have in the indie scene. For as much as everyone wants to be as decadent as superstar developers like Hideo Kojima, sometimes it takes shrewd and calculating decisions to keep you around in the long run.