This role is really about two things: building experimental prototypes and then guiding a small team to turn those into polished, emotionally expressive experiences.
Our new game is about interactions with urban wildlife so most of our prototypes focus on evoking a sense of life. Our goal is to create gameplay that feels squishy, intimate, and strange. Like a scene where you're a worm crawling on a hand and player control switches back and forth between being the worm and being the hand. Or any of the scenes from this reference video we made but with more of a Jim Henson vibe.
Making creatures feel alive requires help from every department. Your role here is to take the complex, fuzzy goals that come out of our initial prototypes (eg making a seagull's behavior feel more seagull-like) and distill those down into a cogent set of tasks and priorities for the rest of the team. Then help coordinate and guide the process.
You should be someone with a strong interest in using gameplay to evoke emotion and with the technical skills to single-handedly build playable proof-of-concepts.
We want our interactions to feel as lifelike as possible but we also don't want to spend the next two years making a single squirrel. Hopefully you've learned some hard lessons on previous projects and can push us to ruthlessly cut things players aren't going to notice while advocating for the big swings and little touches that help create memorable moments.
What you'll do here
Must haves
Nice to haves
This role could be fully remote or you can join us in Los Angeles if you'd like.
If you think you'd be a good fit, please contact us.
