Technical Designer - Project Zanaris

As a technical designer you will act as a bridge between the game design and programming teams, translating design concepts into technical requirements and ensuring that gameplay mechanics are implemented accurately and effectively. You will use scripting languages and tools to implement gameplay systems, mechanics, and interactions, ensuring that design elements work correctly within the game engine and integrate seamlessly with other systems.

You will be responsible for creating prototypes to test new gameplay features and mechanics, identifying potential issues and iterating on solutions to refine and optimise the design before full-scale development. You will create and maintain documentation for the technical aspects of game design, including specifications and workflows, and communicate these details to both design and programming teams to ensure alignment and clarity throughout development. You will identify and resolve technical issues related to game design, such as performance bottlenecks or bugs, and work to optimize systems and processes to enhance the game's performance and stability.

What you'll be doing:

• Designing engaging and diverse content that plays to the game’s technical strengths and aids the design of other content by laying strong technical foundations.
• Proactively offer technical input to the entire team to ensure all content is technically efficient and sound.
• Assist in the creation and maintenance of technical design documents and technical documentation.
• Your design work will be considerate of business needs and gaps in existing game content.
• Problem-solving and writing script using our in-house language, RuneScript.
• Collaborate with multi-discipline development teams across the business.
• Handling code for projects of reasonable size and complexity.
• Learn how exactly certain parts of the game engine function in conjunction with our scripts.

What you'll need:

• Technical experience with Scripting or Programming. This will be required to get to grips with our in-house scripting language, RuneScript.
• Experience of LUA, Python or similar scripting language.
• A pro-active work ethic who can take on problem solving, without being afraid of the challenge.
• An ability to guide, mentor and inspire other creative people.
• An understanding of MMORPGs, their internal structures and systems.
• A passion for games and a desire to breakdown designs and discuss with others.
• Experience working in a game design or development team and can demonstrate an understanding of game development processes such that you can guide improvements to our own development environment.
• An understanding and ability to utilise version control software, like Perforce.

What we offer:

When you join Jagex you can look forward to a generous Perks & Benefits package including:

• Private Healthcare, including Dental Plan.
• Minimum 6% Pension contributions.
• Employee Assistance Programme & onsite Counselling.
• Life Insurance.
• Discretionary annual performance bonus.
• Enhanced family leave policies from day 1.
• Flexible working hours.
• 25 days annual leave + Bank holidays & the option to buy/sell holidays + so much more!

Collaboration is at the heart of Jagex. We love getting together with our teams to share ideas and socialise.

If you live in the UK, we offer a flexible working model that empowers you to work in the way that suits you best, while also getting the best from your working relationship with all the great people you’ll be connecting with here. We support you to be set up for success no matter where you log in.

Flexibility really is the key to how we set up working schedules, we’ll discuss your needs with you and be transparent about the working schedules of the team you’ll be working with during our interview process.

Please note that due to us approaching the Christmas & New Year break, we have many people among the hiring teams who are on annual leave or will be absent due to the studio closing over the holiday period.
This means that, in most cases, applications made during December are unlikely to proceed to interview until January 2025. We appreciate your patience during this time.

About Jagex:

Make forever games with us.

Jagex is a thriving international games company with a growing library of forever game IPs for core gamers. We have such huge expertise at running games for the long term that we re-define expectations for what evergreen success looks like.

We create spaces for our players to come together – with each other and with us – inside and outside of our games. We empower our players with real influence on the game’s evolution. We help our players belong. Our community experiences give players a greater stake in what they’re playing, creating loyal forever fans.

These strengths inform our vision of our studio as a thriving international games company with a growing library of forever game IPs for core gamers. Our forever games will nurture sizable communities whose loyalty provides consistent revenues.

This in turn drives our mission: We create forever fans by empowering our community. We give players experiences worthy of their long-term time investment and actively collaborate with them to shape the games and the community for the better.

If this is something you want to be a part of, get in touch.

We have 500 of the industry’s most talented individuals in our Cambridge studio; if you share our values and ambition, we’d love to talk to you. Worried you don’t meet all the requirements in the spec? Your attitude, fresh perspective and experience is just as important to us; if you think this could be the perfect job for you, let’s talk.