Game Designer - The Sims

Welcome to Maxis, home to tinkerers, craftspeople, & storytellers. Our drive is to inspire everyone to make a better world through creative play. As the developer of The Sims, we create games and experiences for millions of people around the world and are always looking for new ways to inspire our players. Maxis is a place where you can do what you love and help others grow while doing it; a place where your unique voice can be heard and seen. We put creativity and inclusivity at the core of our work and don't settle for seeing the world only as it is, but strive to build a world as it could be.

You will be reporting to the project's Development Director.

Location (Hybrid): Vancouver and Toronto. This is a hybrid role in studio 3 days/week.

Responsibilities

• Design systems, mechanics, and content (e.g., events, event quests, and rewards) from concept through implementation to completion.

• Create designs based on goals set by the team Leads.

• Find practical and creative solutions that achieve the intended player experience and fit within the project scope.

• Improve designs based on team input, user research and playtesting, game metrics, and sound systems design practices.

• Create systems design and technical design documents that communicate intent to the team.

• Collaborate with all team disciplines, including artists, animators, modelers, engineers, quality assurance, and producers to get support from the team and guide a project from initial design to final production.

• Champion a design and get the team excited to work on it.

• Create interesting gameplay goals that lead to interesting player choices.

• Determine gameplay experience goals for designs, and tune features to meet those goals.

• Become proficient in Maxis' proprietary game designer development tools to implement your designs, tune, and bug fix.

• Become proficient in creating gameplay objects and drive creative solutions using existing functionality. 

• Write copy and player-facing text that relates to the event theme for the content created.

• Become knowledgeable about the game and our community, drawing from our large, varied player base and our past games to make and defend intelligent design choices going forward.

• Debug work.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of game design experience on a video game development team.

• Experience becoming proficient with multiple proprietary development tools.

• Experience on past game projects using a variety of scripting solutions to implement, tune, and bug-fix features using scripts, XLM/JSON, and/or blueprints with a game engine (Unity/Unreal) or proprietary editor.

• Experience designing meta systems and content for a live operations game. 

• Design and implementation experience with game features that focus on open-ended player creativity.

• Experience writing detailed design documentation throughout a project life cycle.

• Work with project managers and prioritize multiple tasks.

• Effective at working both autonomously and in groups of different profiles.

• Experience with data-informed design practices, a/b testing, and segmentation.

• Knowledge of and enthusiasm for gaming: playing, deconstructing, and creating.

Desirable Skills

• Technical Design, scripting or engineering background.

• Worked on a AAA HD title.

• Worked on a large team.

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent.

• Comfortable with Excel, Looker or Tableau, Google Drive (Docs, Sheets, and Slides), Miro, Visio, JIRA, Perforce or Git, and online collaboration suites such as Confluence and Slack.

• Experience with games in The Sims PC franchise and other life simulation games.

• Has designed and implemented Live Service content including Quests, Events, and/or game items - Rewards.

• Narrative Design experience.

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS The ranges listed below are what EA in good faith expects to pay applicants for this role in these locations at the time of this posting. If you reside in a different location, a recruiter will advise on the applicable range and benefits. Pay offered will be determined based on a number of relevant business and candidate factors (e.g. education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, or business needs). BASE SALARY RANGES

• British Columbia (depending on location e.g. Vancouver vs. Victoria)
  • $89,300 - $123,000 CAD

In British Columbia, we offer a package of benefits including vacation (3 weeks per year to start), 10 days per year of sick time, paid top-up to EI/QPIP benefits up to 100% of base salary when you welcome a new child (12 weeks for maternity, and 4 weeks for parental/adoption leave), extended health/dental/vision coverage, life insurance, disability insurance, retirement plan to regular full-time employees. Certain roles may also be eligible for bonus and equity.