Senior Encounter Designer
We're looking for a Senior Encounter Designer to join our team at Hypixel Studios, which collaborates remotely from around the world. Our members range from industry newcomers to experts with 25+ years of experience. Team members come from a diverse set of backgrounds, but share a common passion for building polished player-focused, community-powered games.
Join us on our mission to bring players together in an inviting, immersive world where they can make their mark. Hytale empowers creative expression across a spectrum of experiences including sandbox adventure, social play, minigames, and creativity using a suite of powerful and accessible tools.
As a Senior Encounter Designer you will be responsible for designing and implementing encounters ranging from procedural open world experiences to handcrafted experiences that celebrate immersive story beats and multiplayer seasonal events. Through research, prototyping, and collaboration with Level and Game Design, you will establish the methods, tools and systems required to populate a vast open world with varied content.
The ideal candidate has demonstrable experience in the areas outlined above and is equally excited to oversee the quality bar and execution of the broader Encounter team. They delight in critical thinking and weaving visual, narrative, and gameplay elements into cohesive experiences.
Who you are:
- A designer who composes engaging gameplay challenges and events through a balance of NPC behaviours, level design, and narrative elements that engage and delight players.
- A consumer of open world games who strives to stay up to speed with industry defining approaches to encounter design.
- Motivated to contribute not only to a AAA genre redefining game, but equally to the cultural and communication habits of a fully remote, AAA development studio.
- Self-motivated and principles driven team player with a solid work ethic and cooperative attitude.
Some of your Role:
- Setting the quality bar for encounters within Hytale, delivering interesting and varied combat and non-combative encounters in an online game.
- Research, prototype, and refine the implementation of workflows, content systems, and tools that ease the creation and management of encounter content.
- Work with systems and game design to balance encounters across the game, both in their difficulty and in the systems driving their distribution.
- Implement encounters using high-level scripting languages such as Lua or Blueprint.
- Mentoring and helping to grow the Encounters & Level Design team.
Essential traits:
- 7 years experience in professional Game Design
- Shipped or worked on at least one AAA adventure game
- A deep understanding of the role gameplay mechanics, animation, sound, level design etc. play in the formation of encounters and demonstrable ability to critique each aspect.
- Experienced with setting up frameworks for encounter creation, management and tuning.
Bonus traits:
- Capable programming or scripting experience
- Experience working on a live product
- Experience with the block game genre
We can offer:
- Competitive salary
- Annual Performance Bonus (APB)
- Quality of Life increases
- Christmas closure
- A chance to work on a new game project with an extremely motivated team
- Opportunities to learn and grow personally and professionally
- A stable and secure work environment
- The ability to work remotely