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Design Director

Rovio’s Battle Studio is all about making games that don’t shy away from mixing RPG and action elements with strategy. As such, the team is working on creating the most approachable 4X game on the market, which is currently in soft launch, while also busily prototyping other types of strategy games behind the scenes. Set up in 2016, the 50-person strong studio has a flat hierarchy, a high level of transparency and open communication. The team is always trying to find ways to improve its projects, tools, communication, and themselves, while keeping the atmosphere friendly, inclusive, respectful and super supportive. With flexible hours, the team are respectful of each other’s time, as well as collectively learning from both mistakes and successes as they grow in numbers and experience. In a nutshell, the team’s mission is to increase the accessibility of the strategy genre by making such games more appealing to a broader audience.

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Who’s going to develop the world’s most approachable 4X game? You are. It’ll be the game that reaches the widest 4X audiences so far. We are looking for a passionate Game Design Director to join our dynamic Battle Studio in Helsinki region, Finland.

This is a key leadership role in the Battle studio with the possibility to influence the whole of Rovio Games. You’ll need a mixture of talent, experience and passion in the following key areas:

You have vision. We need someone who is able to drive the studio’s design activities and the design team’s competencies to a direction that combines casual approachability with novelty and strategy game systems depth. You know both casual and mid-core games’ systems and mechanics by heart and have critical thinking to know when to improvise and come up with something new. Help us define what our audience wants, what creates true emotional connection to the games we make, to make our players think about the game even when they are not playing it.

You are intellectually curious. You absorb new knowledge every day, and see new challenges as learning opportunities. You want to understand human psychology and social dynamics to really tick players intrinsic motivations and needs. We expect you to have strong opinions, but always to engage in fruitful discussions about them.

As the team lead for our studio designers ranging from very talented juniors to seasoned industry veterans you coach and elevate your team. You get joy out of finding great new people to join us and bringing out the best in people. You continuously seek improvement in yourself and the people around you. When you speak, you speak persuasively, and people want to listen. You can see the forest from the trees and you help co-workers find focus.

You recognize that design is the heart of the game team and that having an excellent game team is the only way to create great games.

Who we think would do great in this role:

• Recruit, coach and manage talented designers.
• Solid experience in creating and leading game concepts.
• Very strong core game design skills as well as system design skills.
• Excellent understanding of UX as being the key component behind the best games.
• Previous commercial success with mobile F2P games.
• Passion, methods and skills to drive the high level design strategy from the inception to the nitty gritty details.
• Experience from driving revenue growth in live ops.
• You follow the trends and actively play mobile F2P games.
• A breadth and depth of entertainment interests outside of games.
• We love very hard problems. Hope you do too.

In summary: “While coaching the best strategy game team in the West, you'll leave a conclusive mark to our game strategy. The strategy games you participate in developing aim to become household names.”

Looking forward to hearing from you and receiving a showcase of your past work!