This job might no longer be available.

Principal Game Designer

Team Overview

At the CrowdStar Studio, we believe there is a huge opportunity in interactive entertainment products for women. Our goal is to build products that engage, enrich, and empower.

With our two top-grossing titles, Covet Fashion and Design Home, CrowdStar has developed new ways for players to enjoy fashion and interior design. We are changing how women interact with games. We are changing how they discover and shop for everything from clothing to shoes, and furniture to home decor. As a team, we are passionate about creating fun and engaging games for women, and also enriching lives outside of the game.

We are now looking to expand our audience with an exciting third title in development, Table and Taste. This product builds on the success of Covet Fashion and Design Home by taking our insights and applying them to everything food.

Role Overview

We're looking for a Lead Game Designer who's a voice that inspires metrics-driven game design and player experience, ensuring strong engagement, retention, virality, and monetization. You will help improve the player experience, designing game features and driving important decisions that impact development. You have experience designing for titles in all stages of development, from prototyping, through production, to live operations.

You will have a passion for working with a team of Game and User Interface Designers as they work with User Research and PM Teams to form a vision for the future of Table and Taste. You are familiar with all the top mobile titles, and bring that wealth of knowledge to bear on content creation, with a deep understanding of the casual player. You are both creatively- and strategically-minded, able to make creative use of game features to create a fun experience that satisfies player motivations.

Responsibilities:

• Envision, prototype and validate feature concepts through user research
• Through player research help determine and articulate player motivations
• Articulate and inform the "player journey" and make sure all features and game elements support that player journey
• Strong sense of UI / UX to work with artists to ensure we get the most out of our features
• Research, validate, and refine features in that roadmap before they reach development
• Design next set of creative features targeting numerous important metrics such as early retention and long term engagement
• Design features in-game to extend the game's influence past the screen and into daily life, providing an even more enriching experience
• Create features and systems for a free-to-play mobile game
• Organize and run team brainstorms
• Respond to emergent Engineering, QA, and design issues in development and ensure these are addressed to meet product goals and release plan targets

Requirements:

• Familiarity with working well in an agile manner with Product Managers, UI Designers, Producers, QA Testers and Engineers to deliver excellent games while working within the requirements and constraints of technology, schedule and budget
• 5+ years in design for either casual or female games
• A passion for learning and user empathy
• Strong ability to document features
• Experience designing product features in social platforms or in-game social features
• Consolidate feedback on designs
• Core knowledge of best design practices
• Solid balance between "the big picture" and day to day
• Experience with the player journey and how it maps to various features in-game
• Strong empathy and knowledge of a female audience
• An understanding of usability principles
• UI/UX experience
• An understanding of statistics and analytics
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience