Two senior developers from Lanternfall Studios have left to start their own company. Kindling Works, based in Lisbon, was announced this morning by co-founders Jonas Ekberg, who was lead combat designer on Ashen Meridian, and Sade Adeyemi, who served as its production director. Both left Lanternfall after the game shipped on September 24.
The studio already has 22 employees, several of them hired from outside the games industry, and is working on an unannounced third-person action game built on the Lumen Forge Engine. Kindling Works is funded through a combination of private investment and a regional arts grant, and does not have a publisher. Adeyemi said the studio intends to fund the prototype phase entirely on its own before speaking to partners.
We’ve both worked on teams of two hundred. You can make wonderful things that way, but you spend a lot of your week explaining decisions instead of making them. We want a studio where everyone can still fit around one table.
Sade Adeyemi, co-founder of Kindling Works, in the studio’s announcement
The founders have written a handful of commitments into the company’s founding documents, which they published in full alongside the announcement:
- A headcount cap of 40 people, which can only be raised by a staff vote.
- A four-day working week, piloted for the first 12 months and then reviewed.
- Credits for everyone who works on a project for 30 days or more, including contractors and QA.
- No unpaid overtime, with crunch defined and prohibited in employment contracts.
Lanternfall said in a brief statement that both founders left on good terms and that the studio is “proud to have helped them get here.” Lanternfall continues to support Ashen Meridian and has a patch in testing that it says will address performance in the game’s larger ruins. Kindling Works has not given a timeline for its first project.
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