Level Designers merge game design with all other components of game development, defining the final experience a player will have. At Arctic 7, Lead Level Designer works closely with all departments and integrates gameplay specific designs. Levels can have different degrees of complexity but almost always revolve around presenting players with options and guiding their experience through different design mechanics.
Level Designers own the player experience from conception to completion within their level. This includes paper design, diagrams, scripting, art guidelines, mood and emotion, difficulty, variation, bug fixing, grey boxing, decision making, etc. Arctic 7 is creating a driven team of Level Designers who have intimate ownership over their areas of work and can challenge their skillset.
The Lead Level Designer drives the level design team’s efforts and leads by example. As a Lead LD, you would be taking the designs from game design and ensuring the moment-to-moment gameplay is executed across all levels in the game.
Having this role, you will:
- Lead a team of level designers across both single player and multiplayer game modes.
- Ensure Level Designers have a proper amount of direction to keep them fun, cohesive, within scope, and married to the project vision.
- Ensure other department needs are received, processed and accounted for.
- Do in-depth research and due diligence for a game, audience, partners, genre, empathy, and market impact.
- Understand game design rulesets and how to best utilize them in level designs.
- Mentor dev team for level design insights and understanding of level design theory.
- Prototype gameplay ideas.
- Do light scripting (technical workload).
- Conduct play sessions with other team members to gather feedback and test ideas.
- Document and manage living documentation including 2D paper level designs.
- Aid in planning development timeline for needs of level design and project.
- Describe level designs backed by level design theories, challenges for development, and why a level design works.
- Communicate with partners internally and externally to discuss level design needs.
We expect:
- Minimum 5 years’ experience working in professional game development as a Level Designer.
- Experience working on FPS level design.
- Ability to effectively plan, direct, and execute level design team efforts.
- Proficiency in level design documentation and ability to describe level design features clearly.
- Ability to identify ways players can exploit features early in their level.
- Ensuring designs work well with the rest of the design and scope.
- Understanding of player skill level and how to plan difficulty for mass appeal.
- Ability to 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 level design theory to team members.
- Ability to work with engineering/technical design efforts to make own level designs come to life.
- 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.
- English fluency to be able to handle communication quickly and accurately.
Nice to have, but not required:
- 1+ years working as a lead level designer.
- Active involvement with the gaming industry (expos, blogs, tutorials, etc.).
- Engagement in mods/custom content in their free time, actively pushing their horizons.
- Ability to handle 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].
