Product Features
Blog
Contact Us
Sign In
Splash Damage
,
London, Greater London
Senior Game Designer
Overview
Job Description
Description About Splash Damage Come join us! We founded Splash Damage with a mission to create lifelong friendships for our players and our employees by building the world's most engaging multiplayer experiences with world-leading partners. Our teams have just celebrated the launch of Gears Tactics and we're currently working on several exciting unannounced titles. Our people always come first, and we acted swiftly to ensure that we moved all our employees to a work from home model during the COVID-19 outbreak in the UK, and this will continue for the foreseeable future. With our first-class virtual onboarding programme, we're able to get you up and running from your home during this time and we're maintaining our relaxed and welcoming culture with digital social events, daily company communications and much more. We will continue to monitor the situation in line with government advice, but we will expect you to come and work with us in our friendly studio in Bromley as and when it's safe to do so. We're advocates for work-life balance and offer flexible working arrangements to suit individual needs and a comprehensive benefits package which focuses on family and mental well-being. Together with this we've been running a formal Equality, Diversity and Inclusion programme for nearly two years and are committed to increasing diversity across our 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 * At least 3 years of 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.)