Designers create the features and content that entertain our players. They ensure our games are fun, exciting, and immersive, and tell a story that our players want to return to again and again. It is a designer’s responsibility to construct mechanics that suit everyone from hard core to casual gamer, with elegant designs that are easy to learn, but difficult to master.
Designers find the right designs quickly, implement them efficiently, and iterate until they have created an epic experience that pushes the boundaries for our players. A designer must champion collaboration, creativity, and quality in every design. At Arctic 7, we are building a very close team of game designers to create exceptional games together.
As a Technical Designer, you will take responsibility for multiple game systems and the content to support them. You will take them from initial concept, champion their vision, define their requirements, work with the team to implement them, and then iterate and tune them until they meet all their goals.
Having this role, you will:
- As part of the Game Design team, invent, then implement gameplay systems and features consistent with project goals and tenets.
- Validate your gameplay hypotheses through rapid prototyping and team feedback.
- Ensure your work does not incur unplanned technical debt.
- Communicate system designs to teammates in an audience-appropriate way.
- Make your gameplay inventions genuinely flavorful to players, enriching the fiction of the world without compromising playable function and the long-term health of the game.
- Lightweight self-production: basic task breakdowns, estimates, and timekeeping.
- Model the culture and help build the team. Rotate through interview panels with all disciplines, onboard new hires, help tend to team health and culture in open team discussions.
- Promote and build an inclusive work environment.
- Work with developers in all disciplines and contribute to topics at the project level. While everyone has an area of focus, building a great game and a great development experience is everyone's responsibility.
We expect:
- 5+ years of professional experience as a designer in the games industry.
- Fluency in one or more text-based scripting or programming languages such as C++, C#, or JavaScript, among others.
- 3+ Experience with Unreal Engine or Unity.
- Very experienced with hands-on, iterative, rapid prototyping and direct implementation of gameplay features.
- Experience building interrelated core gameplay systems. You are skilled at making unknown design spaces known, and can personally implement your systems such that they are easily extended by others in the future.
- You've worked in domains where you've had to do some of the following:
- Blend elements of strategic and real-time gameplay.
- Design very permissive and re-playable experiences that promote inventive player expression and cleverness.
- Invent and implement durable play patterns.
Hive to have, but not required:
- College degree in computer or design-related field, or equivalent experience.
