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Senior Game Designer

About Splash Damage

At Splash Damage, we’re dedicated to crafting team-based multiplayer games that ignite friendships as much as they do healthy competition and teamwork.

Our teams celebrated the launch of Gears Tactics earlier this year, and we’re currently developing Outcasters for Stadia along with several unannounced titles.

As an UnrealEngine focused studio, we're excited to be transitioning our teams to the latest in UE5 technology and we're looking for skilled and passionate developers to help us drive this.

We're advocates for work-life balance and offer a comprehensive benefits package focused on the well-being of our staff and their families.

We believe that teams create the best work when they have a range of perspectives and experiences to draw from. Therefore we're committed to increasing diversity across our studio, fostering an inclusive environment to ensure everyone's voices are heard.

Due to the on-going COVID-19 outbreak, we're all currently working from home. We’re still looking to welcome new team members, who'll join us remotely until we return to the studio

The Role

As Splash Damage’s Senior Game Designer you will be responsible for the game design of numerous critical features of a game, or the complete design of a companion product, driving end to end implementation across the team. Helping to maintain and realise the vision, defining quality targets and validating the quality targets of others across the entire project, cross discipline.

You will work to create a unified game experience and realise and communicate the game vision across the team, ensuring alignment across all disciplines. You will create and maintain documentation including the GDD and wiki pages, though you will largely communicate verbally; spending time with each design team member and feature team member, at their desks, ensuring they understand the vision and design, are “bought-in” and have what they need to do their jobs.

If necessary, deputizing for your Lead, you will regularly and effectively communicate with any external partners or publishers; managing those relationships, presenting the creative achievements of the team, negotiating feature / change requests.

You will manage, mentor & coach Game Designers, including working with Production and your direct reports to schedule tasks. You will act as hiring manager for junior designers.

You will regularly be part of peer-reviews.

You will regularly communicate out progress against quality, scope and game vision alignment expectations. You will discuss and explain the rationale behind your decision making and listen, iterating on feedback from other disciplines or Designers. You will regularly present the areas of the game you are responsible for to the studio. Where necessary you will speak to the media and prepare key product messaging for the media.

You will implement feature optimisations and tuning plans; you will own the tuning for accountable features or levels. You will parse feedback from focus group sessions, integrating relevant feedback into the product design.

You will verify task estimates provided by junior staff and in turn work with your Lead to give your own accurate estimates for work as well as logging work in management software. You will provide input to Production / Management on project schedules throughout development to prioritise tasks / workload for the developers responsible for their assigned feature-set, in alignment with the product vision. You will articulate the impact of changes to the game-design to the developers on your team.

Essential Skills and Experience

• A passion for making and playing games
• A deep understanding of all aspects of design including; feedback, controls, balance, narrative, game-feel, retention, usability, on-boarding, social mechanics
• Industry experience in a Senior position and 1 shipped AAA current gen (PS4 / XBOX ONE) console or PC title that featured a multiplayer component, worked on from beginning to end
• Fierce attention to detail
• The ability to work independently without close supervision
• Experience of people-management, mentoring, line-management, ideally of a small team under you
• Experience in creating first or third person shooters
• Excellent verbal and presentation skills
• Knowledge of industry trends in regard to genres, gameplay, development models, and financial models
• Experience of prototyping gameplay mechanics using UE4, Unity, or similar

• Experience writing high quality and thorough design documentation including diagram and flow-chart creation, wiki-based design documentation and spreadsheets

• Experience with source-control applications (SVN, Perforce, AlienBrain, etc.)
• The ability to work collaboratively with other disciplines and experience of being a key part of a Senior group
• Strong maths skills; formulas, probability, statistics and balancing
• Highly experienced with Microsoft Office Products and other business software including: Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, Visio, Adobe Photoshop or similar
• Strong problem solving skills including lateral thinking
• An understanding of systems, systemic design, emergent gameplay and the place of procedural content generation in development
• Deep player empathy

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Unreal Blueprints
• Traditional art skills
• Experience with scripting or programming language
• Undergraduate degree in Video Game Design, Computer Science, Marketing, Entertainment or a form of technical training
• Experience of being a developer during the live phase of a game as a service, including using telemetry / metrics to inform design and content decisions
• Experience of parsing the results of, and acting on, market research e.g. Focus groups, qualitative and quantitative surveys etc.

Splash Damage is an equal opportunity employer. We believe our teams create better work when they have a range of perspectives to draw from, and we are committed to creating an inclusive working environment that celebrates diversity.