Lead Game Designer
Description
If you are the type of game designer who enjoys working on unique and unorthodox projects and has a passion for interactive environmental storytelling, we want to hear from you!
Working within a mature first-person framework, the heart of your work will be to deliver an emotive experience that will immerse and delight players as they discover a beautiful and magical world.
This role will primarily involve crafting the game’s vision and overarching structure, along with coordinating with a writer and artists to weave a world into being with interesting characters, creatures and wondrous spaces rendered with beautiful art, animation and visual storytelling. You will need to be a confident and pre-emptive problem solver to ensure that the work from the different disciplines fits seamlessly together and work in unison.
Reporting to the Design Director, and working closely with the Producer and Writer, you will ensure that the vision for the game becomes an actionable design that will deliver a quality experience for our players.
You will be leading a small team of designers, coordinating, reviewing and providing detailed feedback to their day-to-day work.
The successful candidate will have shipped at least two titles in a design role, ideally with at least one being on a console platform. As well as being well-organised and a great communicator, we’re looking for someone who is kind and patient, and has had experience in managing other designers.
As a remote-friendly studio, we are pleased to offer remote working wherever possible. This role can be fully remote, based out of our sunny seaside office in Brighton or a mixture of both!
At FuturLab, we believe patience is as good for our games as it is our people. Therefore, we are a no-crunch studio, with a focus on wellbeing. You can read more about life at FuturLab HERE.
Responsibilities
- Working with a writer, lead artist, lead programmer, producer and your design team to shepherd the vision through to a finished product, creating and maintaining design documents throughout.
- Collaborating with the Art and Tech teams to identify and define pipelines, workflows and extra tools needed throughout the development process.
- Leading the design team to ensure delivery of the necessary level design content.
- Mentoring and managing designers on your team.
- Estimating time to accomplish design tasks and committing to meeting these objectives.
- Representing the project, both internally in studio-wide meetings, and externally with press, platform holders and other public facing opportunities.
Requirements
- Excellent working knowledge of Unity.
- Comfortable with implementing basic interactivity for the purpose of triggering animations or level design elements.
- Design experience on multiple projects, and at least one project from conception to release as Lead Designer.
- Ability to break down and scope out design tasks.
- Experienced in leading and mentoring a team.
- Previous experience of working on a multiplatform title. VR design experience is beneficial.
- Ability to effectively use common tools to illustrate concepts so that artists and programmers fully understand their objectives.
- Excellent communicator both verbal and written.
Benefits
- Competitive salary dependent on experience + performance related bonus
- Generous pension scheme
- Private health insurance
- Enhanced Maternity and Paternity leave
- Free remote therapy service via Spill
- 21 days holiday, 8 bank holidays (plus our own FuturLab bank holiday) + 2 duvet days
- Extra days off over the Christmas period
- Bike2work scheme
- Free eye test + standard glasses for display work
- Staff referral bonus
- Regular social activities