Design Director, Head of Adventure

Description

What you will do:

• Own the Adventure experience for the player and bring it to a level that sets a new standard of quality.
• Ensure that the integration of key Adventure elements (Quests, Encounter Design, NPCs, Combat Systems, Difficulty curve, Worldbuilding, Narrative, etc) adds up to a world-class player experience.
• Work from end-to-end in an iterative process, starting at the earliest feature concepts and moving through to directing designers in final implementation and iteration.
• Bring a sense of curiosity, humor, and delight into Adventuring through the game world.
• Follow a design thinking methodology to understand player needs, ideate, and propose design solutions that effectively meet player and business goals.
• Understand our audience at a deep, empathetic level, and formulate solutions that respond to the needs of various player segments.
• Closely partner with Creative Director, UX Director, Director of Product and Technical Director to ensure the Adventure design effort results in smooth and successful implementation.
• Envision and direct designs for content creation that establish the ability to sustain a large live-operated adventure game, ensuring scalability for both content quality and pipeline.
• Understand game engine and performance boundaries, and propose creative solutions that work within them.
• Partner with Art, UX and engineering to create prototypes that explore specific interactions and behaviors, to help iterate on features early and articulate the desired feel and functionality.
• Manage the design of multiple features at once, ideating on new features while simultaneously overseeing development for others.
• Ensure a culture of top-quality specification for all relevant design documentation.
• Inspire, empower and grow a team of game designers to produce the best possible quality of Adventure gameplay

What you will need: 

• 5+ years of game design leadership on a major multiplayer Adventure game, action RPG, or MMORPG
• 5+ years of experience in Quest or Encounter design leadership
• Minimum 10 years working on shipped new or live game products 
• 3+ years working in Free to Play
• Experience iterating on ideas in the early phases of development, in a tightly collaborative environment, as well as working on production or live-operated games
• Demonstrated ability to define and ensure standards of excellence in design documentation

• Bonus: Experience working on major IP, navigating the competing pressures of player expectations and the need to innovate
• Bonus: Experience on cross-platform products, and console / PC games
• Bonus: Experience working directly in Unity