Lead Designer

We are VoxRay Games, a small game studio working on a raytraced voxel game with FPS/RPG/Survival elements! Check out early visuals on https://twitter.com/voxraygames or https://store.steampowered.com/app/2283580/Voxlands/

We are looking for a Lead Designer that can help us bring our game worlds to maximum fun and quality.

What you will be responsible for

• Day to day supervision of a team of 5-10 World Designers.
• Have regular meetings with them both as a group and 1:1
• Review their work and suggest direction.
• Manage their time spent on different worlds, and focus within those worlds (gameplay vs geometry, different areas, etc)
• Ensure their worlds have balanced gameplay, quests, and variety of activities.
• Take ownership of the overarching progression through all worlds that compose the base game.
• Organize recurring story & character elements.
• Plan for the player journey in terms of learning new game mechanics and difficulty progression.
• Manage a consistent theme throughout, commission art from the artists that support current and future world building.
• Manage our “crafting tree” & progression.
• Edit and balance metadata for all items and objects in game (that specify resources required to craft it), such that the overall tree of possible crafting progression paths is fun and interesting for players.
• Ensure crafting progression is properly implemented in individual game worlds (making sure resources are available, how they will be crafted, and how they interact with quests in that world).
• Iterate with programmers on new gameplay systems.
• You identify new gameplay possibilities that would most help the World Designers craft richer experiences, then work with programmers on how to add that to existing systems to maximize WD creativity.
• As new gameplay systems come online, ensure they are used in worlds.
• Help make everything we do clearly overviewable and documented.
• Make what your team is working on clearly represented in our issue tracker, manage priorities, assignments and subtasks.
• Write documentation on our wiki documenting all the above for others.

What we’re looking for

This is very much a “boots on the ground” role (as opposed to a pure “design” role where others implement your ideas).

While your WDs/LDs will spend more time actually building worlds than you, they will look towards you for “how to make interesting quests and good balance” happen in a world, so you are expected to become an expert on our game editors and what they make possible.

Our quest editor in particular is somewhat technical in that it allows you to specify sequences of actions (steps in a quest, usually player initiated) and conditions and effects on them, which are somewhat programmable (a mini UI-driven language). Similarly, our items are highly parameterizable and combinable.

We’re thus looking for a Lead Designer with a fairly technical background that is not afraid to get into the nitty gritty of things, whether it be the aforementioned quest system, or balancing our sprawling variety of craftable objects and items. You bring all these pieces together better than anyone on the team.

At the same time, a designer that has experience with directing the overarching progression design of a game is also very valuable.

We are also very much looking for someone to take strong “ownership” over all world content. Things may not happen unless you make sure they do. You never “drop the ball” on anything you spot needs doing in any game world, regardless of what designers/programmers/artists are needed to execute (parts of) it.

How “design” here is different from other games you may have worked on.

Many games have a “game designer” that specifies every last bit of how gameplay works, and then levels or world merely represent that design in all its areas.

Here, we split things up in “world game design” and “systems game design”. Our goal is to move as much of game design, and in particular game design balance, into individual worlds, allowing each world to feel substantially different in how it plays. This gives a lot of power to the LD (and Lead Designer!) to go their own way for each world, but the downside is that it may be more work to balance an individual world, as there is no strict global game design that specifies that each world must always have certain items/resources available. That’s where you come in.

Then there is “systems game design”, which tries to provide building blocks with as little constraints as possible. This specifies that a game is made of “objects”, “items”, “actions”, “conditions”, “effects”, “triggers”, “entities”, and more. What general parameters these all have. These things are then further defined in metadata and in the game worlds themselves. Defining these systems has so far mostly been done by the founder, but you’ll be helping thinking of ways they can be further extended, and maybe how to introduce entirely new systems.

We are also big on the idea that gamers will be creating their own worlds in our game. So you’re not just designing for the worlds we’re currently shipping with the game, but for the potential of any new worlds.

How to apply

The most important thing for us to see in an application is indications of your passion and experience for precisely the above kinds of tasks. As such, we ask that as part of your application you write some text where you indicate in some detail how you worked on the above responsibilities, and your approach to it. Show us how you are exactly what we’re asking for :)

We like portfolios where even if you’ve been a Lead for many years, there is evidence of you once being a passionate “in the trenches” LD.

Email it to wvo@voxraygames.com

If you get past the first selection process, we’ll want to give you a Steam tester key of our game so you can play with the editor, and show us something you can make with it! Our wiki describing aspects of the editor and game is entirely public, though not all may be up to date.

Job parameters

• This job is fully remote.
• Though we welcome applications from anywhere in the world, we are a US based company. Given that this is a Lead role which requires a lot of (interactive) communication with other team members (many of which are Pacific Time and other US time zones), applicants in non-US time zones would probably need to plan to be available from 9AM Pacific Time (when many of our meetings start) and ideally a few hours beyond that, to be able to work directly with everyone. For Europeans that would mean working into the evening.
• Excellent written and spoken English communication skills required.
• We may want to take you on initially on an hourly, contract basis, but there is a possibility for full-time employment (with health insurance benefits), particularly for US applicants (other countries TBD).
• Hourly rate / salary up for discussion, depending on experience and many other factors. Please let us know if there is a particular range you require.
• This is a full time position. That said, we have the culture that this does not need to mean exactly 40 hrs each week, particularly while you are working hourly: you should feel free to work less hours one week and more another, as your personal schedule, motivation, and other things require.
• You’ll be joining a team of ~12 team members initially, a mix of full-time and part-time. We will likely grow further after you join.
• Length of contract/employment cannot be fully guaranteed, but should be at least 1 year, hopefully much longer!
• Tools we use:
• Any world building activities are mostly done with in-engine tools.
• MagicaVoxel for voxel art.
• VSCode for json metadata editing / gameplay code.
• Git / GitHub <- used for all our issue tracking, wiki etc.
• Discord for team chat and video meetings.
• You will have to be using a Windows machine with a recent/fast GPU.