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Senior Combat Designer

Insomniac Games is looking for a Senior Designer who can help produce high-quality experiences within our games. The candidate should have at least 8+ years of design experience, largely focused on combat design. This individual will act as a key coordinator and collaborator, working with design, engineering, art, and animation teams to create varied and compelling mission experiences, from initial block out to final playable content. This includes taking designs through pitch, concept, implementation, bug fixing, balance, and polish phases.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities include the following:

• Creates clear and concise, visually oriented design materials that explain mechanics, systems, and features.
• Pitches and presents designs to the team and department heads.
• Explores multiple potential solutions to a problem by creating rapid prototypes, evaluating from a player perspective, and iterating as needed.
• Develops and communicates layout, content, or system designs through written documentation, visual design materials, and verbal presentations.
• Builds basic level layout; work with the Art team on how to evolve the design in order to meet each discipline's goals and deadlines.
• Implements gameplay and game structure; works with Gameplay Programming team to deliver content that meet each disciplines goals and deadlines.
• Follows up with multiple departments on progress of missions or features and updates team as needed through various mediums.
• Addresses bugs and gameplay issues to assure a stable and polished product
• Helps assess progress, quality, and user friendliness of project via methods such as usability testing, focus tests and in-house play tests.
• Provides constructive feedback on all aspects of product; finds opportunities to increase quality of product and advises on how information may be implemented or held for future products.
• Other duties may be assigned.

A designer may be tasked in one of the following areas of specialization:

• Multiplayer Design: Develops core game systems for interactions between players, including balance, latency hiding, difficulty scaling, communication, and robustness to drop-in drop-out.
• Mission Design:Develops compelling gameplay scenarios that tightly integrate other systems like level, layout, narrative, combat, and progression.
• Systems Design: Develops and implements game systems such as economy, balance, progression, ambient features, and/or game wide player activities.
• Combat Design: Develops core game action systems such as player actions, player mechanics, special abilities, enemy factions, and archetypes, and/or boot AI.
• Narrative Design: Alongside the animation and story teams will implement, script, and refine the digital acting sequences, ambient and reactive narrative systems.

Education and/or Experience: Eight plus years of professional game design experience or training, or an equivalent amount of game design/development education and experience.

Technical Skills

• Intermediate knowledge and experience with level editing tools and scripting (Unreal Engine, Unity, or similar editors).
• Intermediate knowledge of Maya or other major 3D modeling programs.
• Adobe Illustrator experience and UE4 Blueprint scripting skills are a plus.
• Working knowledge of Microsoft Office Suite.

Other Skills: Individual must have very good interpersonal skills and the ability to communicate effectively with team members and other developers. Strong communication skills including verbal and written skills are required. Ability to work with remote teams from different time zones.

This position is open to remote work from most states in the U.S. and Canada.

Please submit a resume and cover letter to be considered. We look forward to reviewing your submissions!