Canabalt dev announces new collaborative studio, Finji

Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman's new project is a studio called Finji, which is designed to "make new games and create new opportunities," he announced today.

Saltsman is the director of Finji, while his wife, Rebekah, is a producer who contributes to internal game design at the studio. The two of them originally founded the company in 2006, according to its about page, but remade it in 2014.

"For almost 10 years we have been saving and scraping and learning and trying new things (and gotten some insanely lucky opportunities along the way) and having a few spectacular failures (and lots of little ones), all with the ultimate goal of getting to do exactly this: collaborate with who we want, when we want, on the games we love," they said today.

Finji will develop its own games and help bring others to market. The Austin, Texas-based studio's initial portfolio consists of four titles. First up is Portico (image above), which Adam Saltsman is making with Aquaria co-creator Alec Holowka; the pair announced the game last summer under the tentative title Grave. It's a 2D turn-based game in which players lay traps to protect secret gates within ruins, and Saltsman and Holowka provide weekly updates about its development on the title's Tumblr.

Night in the Woods, the adventure game that Holowka and Scott Benson funded on Kickstarter last fall for more than $200,000, will be distributed by Finji. The studio is currently selling Capsule, the claustrophobic survival game from Adam Saltsman and Robin Arnott, and Finji's newest game is Overland, for which the company is collaborating with Shay Pierce of Deep Plaid Games.

"We are extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to do this, and this is one of the reasons we're hoping to extend some of the chances we've had to other folks," said the Saltsmans. "We do not have any outside investment and currently do not have any plans to crowdsource. What this means for us is we make what we want, how we want it."