Studio
About
Hidden State Games
Hidden State Games exists to make games. That’s the goal — always has been. The path there has just looked different than expected.
Hidden State Games is a three-person studio founded and led by Danny Goodayle — Unreal specialist and tech lead, based in Brighton, UK, with over a decade of professional experience across code, production, and management. The studio was founded to build original titles, and our first game is in active development — informed directly by what working alongside experienced teams on shipped games teaches you.
Co-Dev Work
Hidden State Games was contracted to Otherside Entertainment to work on Thick as Thieves — a stealth-heist game co-founded by Paul Neurath and Warren Spector (the duo behind Thief, System Shock, and Deus Ex), set in a steam-era alternate 1910s Scotland. The game launched on Steam in May 2026.
Our Tools
Ludovite came about while looking for QA solutions for our own internal projects. After talking to colleagues across the industry about what they were using, it became clear that everyone was bending generic tools — Qase, TestRail, spreadsheets — to fit workflows they were never designed for. So I built something designed specifically for them.
Ludovite is a QA platform built for game studios: test case management, release runbooks, collaborative execution, and multi-platform cert workflows — built around how game QA actually works, not how software QA is supposed to work.
What We Believe
Games first. The studio exists to make original titles. Everything else — co-dev work, tools — is part of getting there sustainably.
Build for the work that actually happens. Tools should fit real workflows, not idealised ones. That’s true of Ludovite and it’s true of the games we want to make.
Learn from the best work available. Working alongside experienced teams on shipped games teaches things you can’t get any other way. That experience feeds directly into the studio’s own titles.
Hidden State Games is a small team and not currently hiring, but always happy to hear from people working on interesting problems.