Our new game is about the mesmerizing experience of interacting with wild animals.
We're looking for a designer-programmer hybrid who wants to think deeply about questions like "what helps make an interaction feel weirdly alive? Or unsettling? Or intimate?" and can build gameplay prototypes that explore those questions. Our goal is to create moments that feel squishy, intimate, and strange. Like a grub crawling on a hand, a starfish waving its arms, or a lizard emerging from its shell filtered through an aesthetic that includes classic fairytales, Jim Henson, and Junji Ito.
For us, the hardest part about making a game about animal interactions has been that complexity scales up very quickly because animals are ludicrously complicated in terms of their behavior, physics, rendering, etc. We want our interactions to feel as lifelike as possible but we also don't want to spend two years making one seagull. So we're hoping you've learned some hard lessons on previous projects about managing complexity and how to ruthlessly cut things players won't notice while advocating for the big swings and little touches that help create memorable moments. Having experience with a variety of game disciplines and systems would also be helpful since our toughest problems tend to be pretty interdisciplinary.
You should be someone with a strong interest in using gameplay to evoke emotion and with the technical skills to single-handedly build 3D gameplay prototypes. They don't have to be beautiful just emotionally expressive.
What you'll do here
Must haves
Nice to haves
This is a fully remote role. If you're outside of US timezones we ask that your day includes at least 4 hours of overlap with the team between 9am - 6pm, PT.
If you think you'd be a good fit, please contact us.
