Mode Shift
After a lot of mutual discussion and thought, my co-founder Ian Hardingham has decided to leave Mode 7 and hang up his game design hat.
He has now joined Oxford Brain Diagnostics as their Chief Technology Officer. They are a tremendously impressive company and I’m going to be fascinated to follow their future efforts as they work on the early detection of Alzheimer’s.
Ian is an immense talent and it’s been an honour (and sometimes, yes, even a pleasure) to work with him on some excellent things for the last 15 years or so. I know everyone from the games industry will want to send him their love and best wishes for his new direction — I’m sure you’ll see him pop up from time to time.
I also know that this is going to be a disappointment to the parts of our community who were hoping to see more strategy titles from Ian and myself, so we’re sorry that’s not going to happen. Your support for this ridiculous endeavour over the years is hugely appreciated.
As we’re no longer developing large-scale indie games in-house, our sysadmin James and level designer Robin are also departing for pastures new. James is already doing great in a new job, while Robin is currently helping us with Frozen Synapse 2 stuff and looking around for his next move. Their support, understanding and reassurance through this period has been hugely valuable — by the same token, both Ian and myself have tried our hardest in every respect to ensure that their transition to new work is a smooth one.
Mode 7 will continue, however. We are going to keep providing support for the existing catalogue of games, and Ian will continue to have some limited involvement there.
New things will happen as well, as we shift our focus to publishing and smaller creative projects…
Publishing
After the success of both Tokyo 42 and The Colonists, we will be publishing more titles from other devs, so please continue to add to the deluge of pitches in my inbox.
My plan is to continue releasing a small number of games, but giving each title significant attention to help it get made and help it to reach an audience. There are some really interesting games being developed on a small scale right now that deserve to make that connection, and I’m keen to find more of them.
I hope to have something new to announce on this front very soon…
nervous_testpilot
My first personal project this year is Wardialler, a small solo narrative game that I announced last month. It’ll be on show in the Leftfield Collection at Rezzed, so I look forward to seeing you there in you’re in the UK.
Please do follow me on Twitter and Soundcloud to keep up to date on that.
I’m interested in continuing to explore the idea of pairing albums with smaller games. Any projects which emerge from this will come out under the nervous_testpilot banner.
You should see an increase in purely musical output from me as well, as I have another album project slated after the completion of Wardialler.
Collaboration
Over the past couple of years I’ve personally become much more involved with the wider industry, through working with UK Games Fund, consulting for other studios, working on the education side of games, and contributing to the exciting work going on at BGI. This has been very rewarding and it’s something I plan to continue.
If you feel that my input could be valuable in any way, please just give me a shout.
