Gameplay Designer (Creatures)
About The Position
At Gardens Interactive, we believe that games have the power to connect people and foster meaningful relationships. Our studio is dedicated to creating critically acclaimed and commercially successful live-service games through a sustainable and collaborative development process. As a Gameplay Designer focused on creatures, you will shape the heart of our world’s living inhabitants. You will design, refine, and implement systems that bring creatures to life through responsive and engaging behaviors in both combat and non-combat scenarios. Your work will ensure our worlds feel alive, dynamic, and filled with opportunities for meaningful player interaction.
Requirements
- Understanding of how players approach multiplayer play in order to create compelling and engaging creatures (and creature behaviors) that elevate the player experience.
- Strong collaboration skills with the ability to communicate ideas clearly and succinctly.
- Strong playtesting and iteration habits to maintain creative goals while also having a focus on how design decisions affect interpersonal player behavior and relationships.
Nice To Haves
- Extensive Unreal Engine experience, with strong proficiency in Unreal Engine Behavior Trees, Blackboards, and Blueprint Scripting.
- Experience working with and strong understanding of the Gameplay Ability System (GAS) in Unreal Engine.
- Passion for ecological design, systemic worldbuilding, or player-driven emergent gameplay.
- Love for and understanding of the animal kingdom, creature biology, and natural ecologies.
Responsibilities
- Prototype, iterate, and maintain creature behaviors and abilities for both combat and non-combat scenarios in an online multiplayer environment.
- Own the implementation and continuous maintenance of creature behaviors using Unreal Behaviors Trees and Blackboards from prototyping to polish.
- Collaborate with engineers, artists, animators, and audio designers to bring your creature designs to the player experience.
- Own creatures, their abilities, and their behaviors while staying aligned with gameplay design and leadership.
- Collaborate with cross-disciplinary partners to align creature design with art, narrative, 3C’s gameplay, and technical requirements.
- Balance and tune difficulty and behavior to create engaging encounters for multiplayer situations.
- Advocate for the player experience, ensuring creature interactions are fun, surprising, and memorable.
- Partner with Animation to tune movement sets and provide pathfinding logic to ensure locomotion feels grounded and purposeful.
- Act as a key bridge between Art/Animation and Engineering to troubleshoot visual state logic and optimize creature performance.
Benefits
- Competitive Salaries and Pay Transparency
- Stock Options
- Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage (100% for Individuals and 90% for Dependents)
- Life Insurance, Short Term & Long Term Disability, and numerous other benefits
- 401k contributions (USA) / RRSP plan + DPSP contributions (Canada)
- Paid Parental Leave
- Biannual Company Retreats
- Continued Education Allowance
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
