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Technical Narrative Designer

About Splash Damage

The Role

As one of Splash Damage’s Technical Narrative Designers you will contribute to the execution of a game’s narrative, principally by designing and implementing narrative systems and content.

Reporting into the game’s Lead Narrative Designer or Lead Designer you will work closely with art, code, narrative design, cinematic teams, writers and game design; collaborating to ensure the creative vision, themes, story and tone of the title are well integrated and expressed in-game.

Your work will entail the integration of dialogue, cutscenes, in-game scripted storytelling moments, text and localisation with the wider game including logic flow and scripting.

You must be a lateral thinker and able to solve challenging technical problems and implement smart, efficient solutions.

You’ll also be responsible for overseeing and driving the work of more junior Narrative Design staff on the project. You will be responsible for verifying 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 assist in assigning work and ensuring it’s done to a high standard, on time. You will facilitate constant communication between team members, ensuring they understand their goals and how they feed into the bigger picture. You’ll have excellent written and verbal communication and be able to clearly and enthusiastically communicate your narrative / design intentions.

You will coach and mentor more junior staff, making sure they have what they need to do their jobs effectively.

You will help articulate the impact of changes to the technical delivery of narrative to the developers on your team.

You will have a thorough understanding of the narrative delivery / storytelling mechanisms 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 Technical Narrative Design documentation, ensuring Technical Narrative Design guidelines, best practices 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 be expected to regularly monitor the bug database and fix issues in a timely fashion to maintain stability and ensure that the game remains playable at all times.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with writers, game designers and cinematics artists to realise the main storyline for the game
• Design and implement elegant connections between the core gameplay mechanics and various storytelling methods
• Implement scripted moments and dialogue
• Implement and maintain the storyline related mission logic, allowing for the game to progress between story beats in logical order
• Collaborate and communicate with stakeholders across the project to create a compelling journey for the player to explore
• React swiftly to feedback on narrative-related elements, iterating to improve their quality
• Articulate the impact of changes to the technical narrative design to the developers on your team
• Maintain up-to-date documentation to guide the development team’s efforts
• Regularly communicate to the team progress against quality, scope and game vision alignment expectations
• Debug issues around narrative
• Be expert in the narrative tools, workflows and pipelines, ensure best practices are maintained and project metrics adhered to

Essential Skills and Experience

• A passion for making and playing games
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Significant industry experience and 1 shipped AAA current gen (PS4 / XBOXONE) or last gen console or PC title that featured a multiplayer component, worked on from beginning to end
• The ability to work both collaboratively with other disciplines and independently without close supervision
• The ability to take direction, and rapidly absorb and act on stakeholder, publisher and IP holder feedback

• Experience with design documentation, diagram and flow-chart creation
• Experience and strong understanding of Excel, Word and their interactions with other scriptwriting software like Final Draft.
• Experience working with a game scripting language inc. visual scripting, to implement game logic
• Proven track record of establishing and maintaining technical pipelines throughout a project’s development
• The ability to manage and implement written designs and text and audio assets
• Rapid prototyping experience and the ability to fail fast and learn
• An understanding of the deep and varied aspects of interactive narrative

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Experience in creating first or third person shooters

• Experience with UE4
• Presentation skills and experience with PowerPoint
• Experience with wiki-based design documentation
• Undergraduate degree in English, History, Creative Writing, Video Game Design, or a form of technical training
• Experience with source-control applications (SVN, Perforce, AlienBrain, etc.)
• Localisation experience