Hello, we’re Glowmade! We’re a small, exciting company and the goal of our games is to unlock people's imagination and help them express themselves in wonderful, fun ways. Right now we’re busy building a new multiplayer cooperative game with an ambitious creative wrapper around it. We can’t say too much, but if you can imagine Jim Henson’s Labyrinth mashed up with Wrestlemania, then you’ll be on the right track!
This is an opportunity to play a crucial role in our small but efficient code team. Reporting to Jonny Hopper (Co-Founder, Technical Director), you’ll be working closely with him and Adam Sibbick (Art Director) to make our game beautiful. We need shaders! We need performance! We need the box of clever tricks hidden inside your wizard coat. And we need it all in our home-grown close-to-the-metal engine.
Coding WorkflowWe use C++ for the majority of our dev work, but it is often more data-oriented than object-orientated. No complex inheritance hierarchies, template metaprogramming or bleeding edge features that add compile time and reduce readability. We'll still use any feature that makes dev easier, but not at the cost of expensive code maintenance or excessive compilation time.
We use external libraries where appropriate, but where there isn’t one available, for reasons of speed, robustness or feature set, we will roll our own. This lets us concentrate on the features and toolsets our asset creators genuinely need, keeping development as friction free as we can make it:
Don't believe this is possible... Our Senior Tools Programmer Kev said on his first day "Gosh. That was such a relief after years of bloody Unreal. 20 minutes and everything's built and the game is running. I love it!"
These are all times we’d like to lower and “rare occasions” we’d love to turn into “nevers”. Maybe you can help!
From day one we would like you to...
In six months you will be...
The ideal candidate would…
Advantageous qualities
Benefits
- Private Medical Cover
- Weekly PT Sessions
- You get 20 days base PLUS we shut the studio from Christmas eve to New Year's bank holiday inclusive (instead of asking you to take it out of your allowance)
- Accrue extra holiday days per year of employment: 1 additional day of holiday on the 1 Jan following your first full year of work then 1 further day of holiday every 2 years
- 3x Wellbeing Days" per year: Emergency "can't face work today" days. It's like a duvet day except you don't have to stay in bed - it's for you to do whatever feeds your soul
- 3x Charity Days": Extra days to volunteer for social or community work
- Flexible working around our core hours of 10-4.30
- Matched pension contributions (We always give 5%)
- Generous parental leave (Please see handbook for full details)
- Matched charitable giving (you can do a pre-tax donation to a charity and we match it)
- Bike to work scheme (Free bike, basically)
- Game launch and game signing bonuses
- £250 annual "personal development" budget, you can spend this on self improvement in
some way (doesn't even have to be work related)
- £1000 referral bonus: If you refer someone to us who we hire, you get £1000
- PASTRY WEDNESDAY and other delicious food based events
- We throw a good party!
A few more bits...
This role is a full time position with an opportunity for you to make a significant contribution not only to the game but to our team and the company. Everyone at Glowmade has a voice, and it’s important to us that you feel empowered and are given the time and space to use it.
Everyone has something to teach and a willingness to learn, but we understand that even the best people slip up and our focus is on improving our processes by openly talking about our mistakes. We respect people's personal time and have an anti-crunch policy. So long as you don't check in untested code on the Friday evening of milestone week, we won't expect you to work outside your normal hours. However, if you do have time to spare, we have frequent after work activities, including Magic The Gathering, poker, RPGs, miniature painting, karaoke and the ever present pub.
We’re based in Guildford, UK, and are interested in both onsite and remote candidates. We offer competitive wages and are an actively equal opportunities employer. If all of the above sounds exciting and you think you can fill this pivotal role, please get in touch.
We are in many ways a typical UK based games company. Our three founders all worked together at Lionhead, made some half decent stuff, got on well, shared stories, shared a dream - well you know the kind of thing. The key catalyst had been the combination of their core skillsets - code, design and art - the essence of games creation.
To this nucleus, we have gradually added people with complementary abilities such as character creation, UI, animation, systems coding, consumer insight, marketing and studio representation. Now, as a growing company, we have a team that has been lucky to work on some great games for some great companies, but we want to do more.
Any company’s culture will develop over time, especially when growing organically as we are right now. We have, however, from the very start wanted to have a vision with clear creative guidelines. These are, in no particular order, inclusivity, creativity, exploration, community and surprise. That is not to say we are all pink and fluffy. We like looking under rocks, scaring ourselves and generally challenging the expected. And we are working hard to bring these facets into everything we do with the belief that by doing so we will make the best games we possibly can.