Game Designer — Bellevue, WA

Salary Range: $140,000 to $160,000 a year

On-site in Bellevue, WA

About the Role and the Team

This role is for a small team in Bellevue, WA working on a dark fantasy, PC turn based tactics game. Our team emphasizes stability and balance, and our unique structure as a subsidiary with no profit requirement enables us to take a summer and winter break each year, go on trips as a studio, and have a strong culture centered around play.

As an applicant, you should understand that we are not a normal game studio - we make games for an audience of one - a person who both funds the studio, and drives the creative vision for our games. The primary benefits of this structure are:

• Very high stability, as the person is one of the wealthiest individuals in the world, and is deeply passionate about gaming

• Best-in-industry work-life balance, as our deliverables have low time pressure, and we work around the individual's schedule

• Zero profit pressure, as the game is not expected to turn a profit

The drawback of this structure is primarily that the creative vision is entirely driven by the individual, who is simultaneously the financier, game director, and customer. Traditional game design frameworks and audience assumptions will not always apply, and you must adopt extreme audience empathy towards an audience of one to succeed.

The secondary drawback is that you must be willing to work around the individual's schedule, which means sometimes not getting feedback or directives for long stretches of time. This can be both frustrating, but also why our studio has great work life balance!

Responsibilities

You will be responsible for creating interpreting the individual's creative vision and translating it into game design docs, spreadsheets, and Unity prototypes. You will work with the Executive Producer to determine the game's roadmap, priorities, and direction.

You will also need to exercise strong soft skills, as successfully managing the relationship with the individual is a key part of this job. Experience working with difficulty and distant stakeholders, or managing a client relationship will be very helpful.

Who We're Looking For

We're looking for someone who lives and breathes games like Fire Emblem, Dungeons and Dragons, XCOM, Baldur's Gate 3, and similar strategy games. We don't mean "I beat Baldur's Gate 3 with my friends", we mean "I'm on my 5th run of Fire Emblem Engage on Maddening difficulty and I've run out of ways to make the game harder for myself". We're also looking for someone who has had a few years of professional design experience under their belt, and can bring structure and mentorship for the team's junior designers. Direct experience working on a turn based tactics game is a bonus, but not required since there aren't that many of those games out there.

We're also looking for someone located in, or willing to relocate to Bellevue, WA. Our team culture is very important to us, and we believe that game design is a collaborative experience that excels in non-intentional conversations that bubble up from physical proximity.

Generative AI

We understand that generative AI usage is a sensitive issue within a highly creative industry. However, the group that we are a part of is very excited about the possibilities of the technology and how it applies to game development. We are too, and we're looking for people who share that excitement. We spend a lot of our "off time" building and testing AI tools that smoothen and support development, examples being:

• A knowledge bot that connects Confluence, JIRA, and Unity and enables designers to translate design docs to in-game prototypes

• A play tester bot that knows how to play our game, and QAs it 24/7, automatically logging bugs it encounters

We believe humans creativity will always be extremely important, and we don't think AI is going to replace amazing people. Our concept art, initial designs, and system architecture always start as fully human authored. How you use AI tools will be a part of the interview process, as it is foundational to our team.