Studios of all shapes and sizes have been struck down by the video game industry contraction of the last three years. Triple-A companies, small indies, and mid-sized studios founded by industry veterans have all laid off employees and canceled games in the face of modest declines of player spending and unrealized growth demanded by investors.That third group—the studios founded by former employees of companies like Blizzard Entertainment, Rockstar Games, Ubisoft, etc.—has been a particular punching bag for the thinkfluencers of LinkedIn. To be sure, working at a triple-A studio during the release of a game like World of Warcraft or Assassin's Creed Origins doesn't automatically make you ready to run your own company. But the rhetoric around these failures sometimes rises to the level of contempt—as though the investor class is angry at their own past faith in these developers and is now blaming them for their portfolio woes.However strange the discourse has become, it is true that around 2020-2021, investors poured millions of dollars into studios with these bona fides, and these studios have suffered in the years since. If you're a triple-A dev about to fundraise for your own company, or are at the helm of one now, what can you do to survive?Related:In our ongoing quest to answer that question, the folks at Stray Kite Studios—who are about to release their debut game Wartorn into Early Access—caught our eye. Stray Kite was co-founded by BioShock lead designer and Borderlands 2 creative director Paul Hellquist and former Robot Entertainment colleague Shovaen Patel. The pair met during their overlapping time at Orcs Must Die developer Robot Entertainment and jumped into business together after a 2018 layoff.It's that year "2018" that gave us pause. That's a 7 year run for a small team of former triple-A devs, the kind of feat many of their peers hoped for in the 2020-2021 funding boom. With Wartorn soon to launch, we wanted to ask them about their journey—and now that they're pivoting from co-development to original games, what they think the future is for themselves and the industry.Stray Kite Studios developed the Fortnite Creative game Prop HuntThe "games" tab on Stray Kite's website is slim at first glance. The team is only able to publicly talk about its work on Fortnite's Creative Mode and the Borderlands spinoff Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, and Wartorn makes three. But it's been a busy seven years for Patel, Hellquist, and their colleagues. After starting Stray Kite, they dove into the world of co-development and Unreal Engine development, creating the original Fortnite Creative game Prop Hunt, now one of many islands that are part of the Unreal Engine Fortnite UGC system. They had the unusual task of not only trying to make games for Fortnite Creative, but also solving game design problems to create assets and workflows that Fortnite players could use in their own Fortnite Creative games.Related:"One thing we tried to do in Fortnite was to make games you can't easily make in Fortnite," Patel recalled a bit sheepishly. "There was a little bit of mixed goals when we were working on that stuff."After spending time with Epic, Stray Kite expanded its list of clients, eventually reuniting Hellquist with his former colleagues at Gearbox on Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. Co-development allowed Hellquist and Patel to intimately see how different studios are run, offering a rare opportunity to compare and contrast different ways of making games and picking the ones that worked for their shop. "We've taken some [processes] we've liked from some places...and we've put some things to the side that we know we don't want to do," said Hellquist.When the COVID-era venture capital boom hit the video game industry, Patel said he and Hellquist deliberately chose to avoid that line of funding, continuing to "bootstrap" the company. "It would have been easy to go there," Patel said, also acknowledging the company wasn't "immune" to the layoffs and cost-cutting that started in 2022.Related:Despite those challenges, Patel and Hellquist decided it was finally time for Stray Kite to greenlight Wartorn. The pair said it's a product born of their loves of system-driven games to drive player agency. But peeking over their shoulder, you can see a bit of that Fortnite Creative energy still lingering on the product—because as the pair explained it, Wartorn mashes together genres, systems, and themes that don't work well together at first glance.Wartorn's real-time strategy and roguelike gameplayWartorn is a single-player strategy game as inspired by Bungie's Myth: The Fallen Lords as it is modern roguelikes like Slay the Spire. Players take on the role of two siblings building an army of fantasy creatures to lead a caravan across a war-ravaged country and reunite with their family. Hellquist says Stray Kite is releasing the game in Early Access not just for economic reasons, but because the game is a "genre blend" that needs player feedback in development to properly mix together."We know that we don't know everything we need to know," Hellquist said, accidentally invoking an infamous Donald Rumsfeld quote. "Having players be on that journey with us helps us understand what they need and what they want out of this kind of experience."Image via Stray Kite Studios.The pair explained that Wartorn balances their desire to push "player agency." Sometimes through familiar means, like a systems-driven elemental system that lets players experiment with cause-and-effect (and react to what goes wrong). Some of it is in conventional choice-driven narrative that balances the needs of the caravan against morality, evoking the mechanics of 11 bit studios' This War of Mine and Stoic Studios' The Banner Saga.But even if the pair want players to make their own choices and tell their own stories, they want those choices to take place against the backdrop of real-world struggles. The game's story of two young heroes fleeing a region racked by war is a personal one for Patel, who described how his parents fled Tanzania under the threat of violence. His mom had to abandon the dog that protected her from thieves and his father literally buried gold near his home in the hopes of one day returning to reclaim it.He never did. "There's some gold buried in Tanzania you can go get," Patel joked. "We've got this extremism that happened here, and it's personal to me...and it's personal for so many people in the world and throughout all of human history."Wartorn is a case study of where developers can rely on the "familiar" to experiment with something new. While Stray Kite pushes the boundaries on the game's setting and core gameplay, it's relying on familiar fantasy conventions and the popularity of roguelike progression to help players ground themselves. It's also an ambitious choice to tap the real-time strategy genre—though Patel said he prefers to think of it as "real-time tactics" given the smaller focus. "We've started calling this a real time tactics game, because it's a little closer to that," he said. "We're trying to distance ourselves from that expectation [that there will be] base building and managing people, gathering berries and things like that."One might wonder if blending a dormant genre with roguelike mechanics (something that's not really been done successfully, as Hellquist noted) is a wise choice for a small team trying to stay financially afloat. But the pair hope other developers can join them in making these unusual blends of games. "I'm afraid we as an industry are going to stagnate," Hellquist said. "We don't feel like we can explore in the triple-A space the way he used to. I'm not sure a game like BioShock could be made any more."Financial survival doesn't have to translate to taking the safest choices possible. Stray Kite Studios is trying to show the game industry that taking risks isn't just about fulfilling the creative spirit—when well-grounded, it can be what helps your team evolve and grow instead of remaining stagnant.