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Senior Mission Designer

ABOUT SPLASH DAMAGE

We believe that games play better with friends. For more than 20 years, we’ve been creating team-based multiplayer experiences that have entertained tens of millions of players all over the world and forged countless new friendships along the way.

Our studio culture is rooted in our open, friendly, and collaborative environment. Our games are made by people from all over the world, from our entry-level Fresh Talent hires to industry veterans, and we believe that fostering that diverse culture is the best way to build both our games and our studio. We have won numerous awards, including a ‘World-Class’ accreditation by Best Companies and being named one of the UK’s 100 Best Large Companies to work for.

While our offices are based in Bromley, UK, our people have access to progressive working patterns that give them the flexibility to decide how to do their best work.

Benefits:

We offer a comprehensive benefits package for you and your family, including:

• Work your way with access to progressive working patterns including hybrid and fully remote
• Substantial performance-related pay system on top of your basic compensation, along with enhanced pension contributions and our life assurance scheme
• Bespoke VISA and relocation packages for you and your family, with support from our team throughout the whole process
• 25 days of holiday and 8 Bank Holidays a year, plus our annual studio closure between Christmas and New Year’s
• Private Medical and Dental Cover for you and your family, along with a 24/7 digital GP service
• Extensive Mental Health support, with Line Manager Mental Health training, a group of Mental Health First-Aiders, and on-site or remote counselling
• Our bespoke Learning and Development course framework to help you grow as an employee, manager, and leader
• Industry-leading fully paid 30 weeks maternity leave & 10 weeks paternity leave

THE ROLE

You might come from Level Design, Game Design, Narrative Design or dedicated Mission Design but have a passion for, and experience with scenario and mission creation.

This is a highly creative role with a lot of freedom to create exiting encounters. It also demands hands-on work as the successful candidate will be implementing and iterating their own content.

As Splash Damage’s Senior Mission Designer you will be responsible for concepting and creating missions across the whole project. You’ll own multiple missions from concept to completion. Along with other Design leads, you’ll help establish core Mission 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 missions. 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 missions, 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 missions will deliver/showcase them, taking into account project goals, and the target demographic. You will need to maintain up to date Mission Design documentation, ensuring Mission Design guidelines and best practises 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 mission design pipeline. You will also drive ideas to help improve them.

You will maintain a focus on the gameplay aspects of the missions and ensure that focus is shared by the Mission Design team and respected by other disciplines.

You will be expected to present your vision for the missions 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 mission 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 Mission 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 mission 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 missions remain playable at all times. You will work with technical artists and engineers to ensure all missions are performant, and have a strong understanding of performance 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 mission design with mastery in many areas including; story telling, visual language, 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 console or PC title, worked on from beginning to end
• Experience in creating mission content from concept to completion.
• A passion for creating exciting quests and missions.
• 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
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• A passion for mission design and storytelling
• Experience of mission-building using editing tools (Unreal 4 preferred)
• Knowledge of gameplay event scripting and entity setup
• Experience of prototyping missions 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.)
• 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
• 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.