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Senior Encounter Designer

Counterplay Games needs a Senior Encounter Designer to drive design, development, and ongoing stewardship of our encounters and encounter systems. Be the hands-on craftsperson and conceptual driving force behind excellent encounters.

About the Role and Project:

• You’ll be a key contributor to a cooperative action shooter with a powerful player fantasy and rich theme
• Your domain, Encounters, is a critical cornerstone in the foundation that supports player engagement, challenge, social play, and long-term joy

• You’ll collaborate closely with the entire multi-disciplinary team over the course of the project; the design, tech, development, art, and creative directors, engineers, artists, producers, and other designers

About You:

• You’re a wayfinder: an optimistic self-starter who loves taking ideas from a point of inspiration to polished experiences via solid process: a strong vision with clear goals, a bias toward prototyping, thoughtful iteration, pride-free discourse, and - more importantly - advocacy for the players in our core audience.
• You aren’t afraid to explore past the boundaries in a relentless pursuit of the best experience for our players, asking “what if” of others and responding with “yes, and” when others bring new ideas to you.
• You adore and think in systems, and are able to deftly craft individual systems, and the relationships between systems, to achieve the goals
• You want to make a direct and lasting impact on the game both individually and as part of a team

Your Responsibilities:

• Be a visionary, listener, teammate, and maker on a multi-disciplinary, player experience-driven team
• Develop and maintain a deep understanding of and intuition for the target experience, core promise, and vision for the game. Dedicate yourself to understanding all player verbs, allowing yourself to craft divergent experiences that cater to all available playstyles
• Define the goals and values that will guide us toward excellent encounters that will challenge and delight our players over and over again, and then put that vision into action with hands-on design, implementation, and iteration
• Work closely with Combat, Enemy, Level, and Mode Designers to bridge the disciplines and bring their work together in satisfying and highly replayable combat encounters
• Work closely with Enemy Designers to ensure you have the necessary tools, capabilities, and controls regarding AI behavior, spawning mechanisms, mode/objective integrations, and difficulty scaling
• Working with Gameplay Designers, proactively suggest improvements to gameplay systems and principles. Be a key contributor to overall game design, leveraging your unique perspective to help us create the best possible player experience.
• Collaborate effectively with other disciplines - code, animation, sound, visual effects - to bring all components together into a holistic experience
• Use all available tools: paper design, team workshops, implementation in engine, playtests, feedback sessions, iteration and tuning, and competitive inquiry to guide the process of encounter design toward exceptional outcomes for the player experience
• Break down work into well-understood components in order to communicate technical needs, collaborating with engineering and tech to realize opportunities and deftly navigate constraints
• Present the team's work to audiences and stakeholders to persuade, include, and excite

Your Interests & Skills:

• Experience with Unreal Blueprints
• Experience with and enthusiasm for the action shooter genre.
• Experience with open world and/or sandbox PvE design
• Experience servicing the evolving needs of PvE gameplay in a live ops environment.
• Having a level design and/or scripting/technical design background is a plus.