As a Game Designer, the candidate will be responsible for core game design mechanics and specific components of a game. Game designers create and plan out the brains, ‘what is fun’, and emotions of a game. A game designer is someone who believes in empathy, game design theory, and how their designs impact audience perception. At Arctic 7, we are building a very close team of game designers that grow with each other and strive for excellence in game design theory. 

Having this role, you will:

• Work on one or many components of a game that can range from ideation, high level planning, and drive it to completion. Potentially including primary core design elements of a game.
• Do in depth research and due diligence for a game, audience, partners, genre, empathy, and market impact
• Mentor dev team for game design insights and understanding of game design theory
• Prototype gameplay ideas
• Do light scripting (technical workload)
• Conduct play sessions with other team members to gather feedback and test ideas
• Document and manage living documentation relative to your workload
• Aid in planning development timeline for needs of game design and project
• Present game design for instruction and peer review
• Describe game designs backed by game design theories, challenges for development, and why a game design mechanic works.
• Iterate game design during development, monitoring and adjusting feature as needed within allowable constraints
• Communicate with partners internally and externally to discuss game design needs

We expect:

• Minimum 3 years experience working in professional game development
• Must be able to effectively iterate and plan game design features through full production
• Proficient in game design documentation and able to describe game design features clearly
• Able to identify ways players can exploit features early
• Ensure designs work well with the rest of the design and scope
• Understands player skill level and how to plan difficulty for mass appeal
• Can articulate why a feature is engaging, fun, and works with the overall game
• Able to do some scripting (visual scripting, or light text scripting)
• Capable of running playtests to investigate feature playability
• Collects and knows how to process player feedback
• Can describe game design theory to team members
• Able to work with engineering/technical design efforts to make own game designs come to life
• Able to deconstruct/reverse design existing games and their features and document findings
• Able to create clear working instructions for QA and testing efforts for features
• Understands and is engaged in current gaming trends
• Avid gamer
• Can speak English fluently to be able to handle communication quickly and accurately

Nice to have, but not required:

• Actively is involved with the gaming industry (expos, blogs, tutorials, etc.)
• Engaged in mods/custom content in their free time, actively pushing their horizons
• Can handle technical workloads
• Able to do their own artwork at a rudimentary level