so much fun but I’ve got to bear in mind that having the boss around all the time is going to put pressure on people, so having the ability to turn the laptops off is important for creativity and well-being on the team.
When Sumo announced the acquisition of Bristol’s Auroch Digital it was reported to become some sort of support organisation for Secret Mode. Has that been the case? We’re looking at projects that are ideas from Auroch that they want to look at, but also we are taking work to Auroch. As an example we could have a number of fantastic indie opportunities, single person devs or small devs, that just don’t have resources for maybe some console porting. That’s something Auroch has immense experience and quality in doing, so you will see some Secret Mode games which will come through to console and they will have been ported by Auroch.
Has the acquisition by Tencent changed the nature or the outlook of Secret Mode? No, not at all. Our relationship is with Sumo Group and we haven’t seen any change in any kind of structure or modus operandi in that time.
Do you think Secret Mode has found itself within its first year, or is it still looking to find an identity? Yes, Secret Mode has found itself and that’s been thanks to a wonderful team of diverse new starters to the industry, young people, veterans, all walks of life getting involved in Secret Mode. We’ve created an amazing team where everybody’s opinion is listened to. What that has done is given us a number of pillars. And those pillars will become more obvious as our games get announced and you see the kind of stepping stone of content down those pillars. At the moment, we’ve got a fantastic wholesome pillar in which Penko Park and Wobbledogs sit. And then there’s a wonderful game that we’ve signed, A Little to the Left, which we’ll be shipping this year, that gives you this kind of reason-of-being pillar. There are other pillars within Secret Mode that will become more obvious. These all come in from the passion of people within the publisher, finding great devs that we are confident in and want to help deliver their games as they want.
What’s been the biggest challenge during the first year? Bizarrely, I thought the biggest challenge would be just getting our name out there but coming up with a strong brand and a strong logo and the company values early on, really helped us with that. The two things I would say I got wrong in estimating resources were
production and QA. Hiring up in those now is giving us that understanding that we really did need producers and we really did need to use a bit more QA resource on games, because developers just work in such different ways. Some of them have a lot of material. For some of them everything’s in their head. You need a producer to help each one to figure out what it is that they need. And that’s been the takeaway for me – not estimating our production resources enough.
And what’s been the biggest highlight for you? While it didn’t change the world from a sales perspective, bringing Zool back as part of the Sumo Digital Academy project with Jacob Habgood [Sumo Group’s director of education partnerships] was wonderful, because it was a game that was created by apprentices. They looked at the code, they completely solved a number of problems that Zool had, namely, changing the screen resolution and bringing it out. They just did it in such a wonderful way. That joy that our players had in the Steam reviews
was something that we were really over the moon about. And when you look at the games that Secret Mode has published, and you look at the user rating, that for us is the thing that brings us a huge amount of joy, because we know investing in player confidence is going to be really important for the long run. We spend
a lot of time looking at data. It’s very important to have data to guide you rather than tell you what to do, because if you’re questioning it in the wrong way, it’ll give you the wrong answer and take you on a very weird path.
What would you expect to be celebrating on Secret Mode’s second birthday? There’s just some wonderful game announcements that will have been spoken about by next year. They’re going to be games that our players are going to be really excited about getting hold of and that for me is the really exciting thing. I’m sitting in meetings with games that are shipping in 2024 and I know the marketing teams are like ‘yeah, we just can’t announce them yet.’ So for me, it will be more of that, more announcements of what we’re doing, so that more people understand the Secret Mode secrets, if you will.
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