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Expert Game Designer (Dream Blast)

Rovio’s Puzzle Studio has their sights set on becoming the most successful casual puzzle game studio in the world. Exploring new and emerging trends in puzzle games, the studio has built a deep understanding of the puzzle genre and its players since its founding in 2014. The studio has introduced innovations in puzzle game core with the free-flowing Angry Birds Dream Blast, and the narrative-driven Small Town Murders, as well as providing players with exciting new content and events in fan-favorite games such as Angry Birds Friends. With their games, Puzzle Studio aims to create a true emotional connection that stays with players even when they’re not playing.

We are looking for an experienced and passionate Expert Game Designer to join our successful Puzzle Studio and our successful game team Dream Blast.

Our vision is to innovate on the puzzle category with games that fill players with delight. You will bring new ideas and depth to our puzzle games with strong narrative elements, fulfilling social-game systems, and mechanics. You will create deep emotional experiences in our games so that players think about them even when they are not playing. We expect that you share our passion to take puzzle gaming to the next level by providing deeper gameplay experiences, and for that, you want to understand human psychology and social dynamics to really tick players' intrinsic social motivations and needs.

The whole team is located in Finland and plan to work in a hybrid model, meaning they’ll plan to work flexibly with 1-3 days per week onsite whenever the government's pandemic restrictions allow.

Responsibilities:

• Lead all designs for the game Dream Blast, oversee the big picture for the whole game, ensure all design crafts are pushing in a strong direction, and ensure the game is pushing to lead in the market
• Actively participate in the decision-making process with project management and directorship, and oversee the necessary adjustments to ensure the Game Design team can deliver on expectations in a manner that will failsafe team health and player experience
• Understand the player’s needs and ensure the items developed by the team contribute to an engaging player experience
• Transform conceptual ideas into fleshed-out designs with the design team
• Conceptualize, implement, and balance game content through proprietary tools
• Analyze Game Design workload vs production capacity, and work with the senior production team to establish a work schedule and priorities for the Game Design team that is in keeping with the project goals and timeline
• Review Design distribution and work performance of the Game Design team
• Communicate to the Game Design team the objectives, strategies, and high-level information related to the project. Offer full visibility on the progress and development of the game and other job families to the Design Team, and communicate Game Design progress and decision-making widely across the production to ensure full visibility & strong alignment between job families

Who we think will do great in this role has:

• Preferably about 6 years of commercial experience and proven success working as a Game Designer. Experience coming both from operating a live game as well as developing a game from scratch
• Ownership of at least one area of a game. Some experience working as a Lead Designer is a plus
• Experience building either Casual Puzzle games or highly competitive games
• Experience designing and tuning Systems including Meta, Social and Event systems, as well as working closely with BI to understand the data and create a plan to improve KPI’s
• A collaborative leadership approach to empower and inspire those around you, at the same time strong team player
• An ability to align a team behind a vision and manage conflict on a team by listening, understanding, and aligning the team members to the common goals
• Strong spoken and written communication skills
• Critical thinker who is creative, adaptive and a strong problem solver

We’d love it if you have some of these:

• Puzzle game experience
• Live game/events experience
• Unity or C# skills

Recruitment process:

• First meeting: You will meet the hiring manager. The aim is for us to know who you are, what your experience has been and what motivates you. This is also an opportunity for you to learn about Rovio, the wider team and the specifics of the role.
• Second round: You will do an exercise to complete in your own time so that we can better understand your analysis skills and design process.
• Third round: You will meet with Lead Designers to dive deeper into the exercise.
• Final round: You will be invited to meet the Game Lead and team member(s). Our aim is to get a clear overview of your skills, how you would fit with our working culture, your ambitions and where you can help us develop as well as we help you.

We welcome applicants to use the name they want to be addressed by in the application form, regardless of whether it is their legal name.