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Senior Level 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 Level Designer, you will be responsible for the level design of larger, more challenging areas of the product. You’ll own multiple levels from concept to completion. Along with other Design leads, you’ll help establish core Level Design pillars, ensuring the game vision is upheld, maintaining constant alignment across all disciplines.

You will need to work closely with other disciplines to create and maintain fun, memorable and visually appealing levels. You will regularly review feedback from playtests, enabling the team to drive quality in all areas of the game. You will know where to prioritise focus when iterating upon your layouts, ensuring the game’s needs are always met.

You will facilitate constant communication between team members, ensuring they understand their goals and how they feed into the bigger picture. You will coach and mentor more junior staff, making sure they have what they need to do their jobs effectively. You’ll have excellent written and verbal communication and be are able to clearly and enthusiastically communicate your design intentions.

You will have a thorough understanding of the core gameplay mechanics and how the levels will deliver/showcase them, taking into account project goals, and the target demographic. You will need to maintain up to date Level Design documentation, ensuring Level Design guidelines, best practises and metrics are thoroughly documented.

You will be expected to have a clear understanding of the technical constraints of the game engine, the capabilities and workflow of the game editor and level design pipeline. You will also drive ideas to help improve them.

You will maintain a focus on the gameplay aspects of the maps and ensure that focus is shared by the Level Design team and respected by the Environment Art team.

You will be expected to present your vision for the levels and your work to the team, upper management and the wider company at various stages and be happy to accept positive critique from all sources.

You will pro-actively work with the other level designers to share knowledge, review content and ensure consistency both on the immediate team and across the studio.

You will manage, mentor and coach Junior and Regular Level Designers. 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 level design to the developers on your team.

You will be expected to regularly monitor the bug database and fix issues in a timely fashion to maintain stability and ensure that your team’s levels remain playable at all times. You will work with technical artists and engineers to ensure all levels are performant, and have a strong understanding of performance metrics and development/platform restrictions.

Where necessary 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 may be required to communicate outwards to press, communities and fans in various formats from live appearances to pre-recorded interviews to forum engagement acting as both an evangelist and representative of the product and as an ambassador for Splash Damage.

Essential Skills and Experience

• A passion for making and playing games
• A deep understanding of all aspects of level design with mastery in many areas including; visual language, architectural composition, sign-posting, combat and encounter design, flow, game balance, delivery / support of game mechanics, on-boarding, difficulty tuning and pacing.
• Industry Experience working in a senior position and 1 shipped AAA current gen or last gen (PS3 / Xbox 360) console or PC title that featured a multiplayer component, worked on from beginning to end
• Experience of people-management, mentoring, line-management, ideally of a small team under you
• Fierce attention to detail
• The ability to work collaboratively with other disciplines and experience of being a key part of a leadership group
• The ability to work independently without close supervision
• Experience in creating first or third person shooters
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• A passion for environment design and architectural concepts
• Experience of level-building using 3D level editing tools (Unreal 4, UnrealEd, Hammer, Radiant, etc.)
• Experience of prototyping maps and gameplay mechanics using UE4, UE3, Unity, or similar
• Experience writing high quality and thorough design documentation including diagram and flow-chart creation
• Experience with source-control applications (SVN, Perforce, AlienBrain, etc.)
• Experience in multiplayer level design
• Strong problem-solving skills including lateral thinking
• Deep player empathy

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Presentation skills and experience with PowerPoint
• UnrealScript, Blueprints, Flow Graph, or other visual scripting software
• Knowledge of gameplay event scripting and entity setup
• Experience with UnrealEd/UDK and Kismet
• Traditional art skills
• Experience with 3DSMax, Maya, or other professional 3D modelling software
• Experience with Adobe Photoshop or similar
• Experience with scripting or programming language
• Experience with wiki-based design documentation
• Undergraduate degree in Video Game Design, Computer Science, Marketing, Entertainment or a form of technical training
• Experience of being the flag-bearer / champion for a product including giving presentations to press and at conferences / events
• Experience running the live phase of a game as a service, including using telemetry / metrics to inform design and content decisions

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.