Lead Game Designers plan, structure, and lead efforts for a game’s mechanics, theories and other areas of design. These can include things such as lore, world building, and collaborating with other job families and partners to create a high quality gaming experience. As a Lead Game Designer, you will be responsible for ensuring that assembly instructions for ‘what makes this game fun’ are created and easily understood by other developers. You will drive discussions, be proactive in filling missing information, ensuring that the design team is doing the correct work in the correct order. There will be balancing, ideation, creative writing, documenting, at high and low levels. Most importantly, this person will drive the creative vision for design on the project and make sure the gaming experience is fun. 

The Lead Designer is the person developers go to if they need more details about a design mechanic, need inspiration, want to understand design theory, or need to discuss big picture topics for the project. As Lead Designer, you will need to balance high level responsibilities of managing a design team while inspiring the dev team with your proactive and outstanding knowledge of game design and development.

We are looking for a Lead Game Designer who is passionate and experienced with First Person Shooter games. Someone who understands player skill, comfort and what makes an FPS game great. This person must be able to confidently lead a project’s design in both single player and multiplayer efforts. 

Having this role, you will:

• Create solid FPS foundational design, concept and theory for the entire team to follow in both single player and multiplayer settings.
• Guide efforts for the game to be super fun, accessible, and playable with modern standards and multiplatform requirements.
• Track and plan development gates with the rest of the development team.
• Echo the needs of stake holders and creative leadership through the team.
• Create core design structure for the game’s picture, specifically in documentation and monitoring its execution.
• Ensure the high level design is staying on track and that the other departments are understanding the needs of design in a positive and informative manner.
• Ensuring the game is fun through planning, monitoring, reporting, and communication.
• Do in-depth research and due diligence for a game, audience, partners, genre, empathy, and market impact.
• Mentor dev team for game design insights and understanding of game design theory.
• Drive prototyping phases with clear goals and needs.
• Conduct play sessions with other team members to gather feedback and test ideas.
• Document and manage living documentation for the game’s design team, ensuring it is kept up to date and communicated to other teams within the game’s dev team.
• Spearhead dev timeline needs with other leads, producers and directors.
• Present game design for instruction and peer review.
• Describe game designs backed by game design theories, challenges for development, and why a game design mechanic works. 
• Iterate game design during development, monitoring and adjusting feature as needed within allowable constraints.
• Communicate with partners internally and externally to discuss game design needs.

We expect:

• Minimum 5 years’ experience working on AAA Console/PC.
• 1+ years as a lead game designer on core games.
• Ability to manage, lead, train, and motivate a team of designers.
• Strong communication with all other departments in the dev team.
• Proactive problem solving.
• Ability to own game design features from conception through full production.
• Proficiency in game design documentation and ability to describe game design features clearly.
• Ability to identify ways players can exploit features early on.
• Ensuring designs work well with the rest of the design and scope.
• Understanding player skill level and how to plan difficulty for mass appeal.
• Articulate why a feature is engaging, fun, and works with the overall game. 
• Ability to do some scripting (visual scripting, or light text scripting).
• Being capable of running playtests to investigate feature playability.
• Collecting and knowing how to process player feedback.
• Ability to describe game design theory to team members.
• Ability to deconstruct/reverse design existing games and their features and document findings.
• Ability to create clear working instructions for QA and testing efforts for features.
• Understanding and engagement in current gaming trends.
• Being an avid gamer.
• Ability to design with many different genres.
• Ability to mentor and share knowledge with the studio and other game designers.
• English fluency to be able to handle communication quickly and accurately.

Nice to have, but not required:

• Having worked on a well-received game (review scores, market success) as a game designer.
• Active involvement with the gaming industry (expos, blogs, tutorials, etc.). 
• Engagement in mods/custom content in their free time, actively pushing their horizons.
• Being able to handle heavy technical workloads .
• Ability to do their own artwork at a rudimentary level.

Working mode (optional):

• Remote: working from home, from any Europe location that is within 3 hours of the UTC +1 time zone.
• Office: working primarily from Podgorica, Montenegro [company provides relocation support].