New indie studio Furniture & Mattress was announced today, a new venture by indie developers David Hellman, Nick Suttner, and Nicolás Recabarren.
Furniture & Mattress was established as a full-remote studio under the newly announced Astra Fund, which offers funding ranging from $45K for a smaller, newer dev or game to over $1 million for more established devs, with a note that further investments are possible.
Here’s the core staff:
- David Hellman is creating all the art and animation on Furniture & Mattress’ first project, his first full video game undertaking since Braid
- Nick Suttner is handling narrative, production, and business development
- Nicolás Recabarren will be leading the project’s game design and programming
- Tomás Batista will be composing an original soundtrack and audio for the game
While David Hellman worked on Braid as its main artist, Suttner worked at Sony and Sunhead Games as lead writer on Carto, and finally Recabarren was one of two devs that worked on Ethereal.
Furniture & Mattress is working on their first title, the unannounced game they’re currently describing as something that will “explore their shared love of adventure and exploration, clever puzzles, and weird humor.”
“When you’re working on a puzzle, sometimes you need to make a big mess before putting things back together,” says co-founder David Hellman. “You have to push through some chaos
before finding the right order. Drawing can be like that, and so can a lot of things in life, on a personal scale and a big societal scale too. Those are some of the things we’re exploring in our
game mechanics and story.”
Recabarren added, “I love puzzle games and playing with surprising new mechanics, but they rarely keep me hooked until the end. I wanted to create a cohesive world in which you’re not just solving puzzles because it’s interesting, but because you care about the needs of other characters, and want to help. So I reached out to Nick to help me build it”
“We’ve all been making games in some capacity for a long time, so it was important to us to do it in a healthy way – biting off something of the right scope, paying ourselves properly, and sharing in the creative vision of the game,” says co-founder Nick Suttner. “It was also critical to find great partners to work with for the things we can’t do ourselves, like Astra Fund and Popagenda. We want to give this game its best chance at success.”
For now, you can visit the Furniture & Mattress website here.
