Lead Game Designer

OtherSide Entertainment•Concord, NH

18h•Remote

About The Position

OtherSide Entertainment is seeking a Lead Game Designer to join their independent game studio. This role will be instrumental in developing a next-generation immersive sim focused on non-lethal exploration, meaningful choices, and player world-shaping. The position offers a unique opportunity to play a key role in building and launching a major PC and console game, pushing the immersive sim genre forward, and working alongside genre co-creator Warren Spector. The Lead Game Designer will report directly to Warren Spector and collaborate closely with the Game Director, Lead Producer, discipline leads, and the leadership team.

Requirements

Lead Designer and people manager experience within the past 5 years on a successfully released and well-regarded PC or console game, expansion, content pack, or live title release.
Experience managing multiple direct reports, design processes, and design information repositories.
Comfortable managing people, supporting career growth, giving clear feedback, making decisions in ambiguous situations, and collaborating across disciplines.
6+ years total game design experience.
At least two shipped titles with a team management role.
Strong sense of what makes gameplay great and how to build toward a high-quality bar.
Ability to help a team achieve quality without resorting to negative management tactics.
High energy, strong communication skills, and a healthy respect for the messy, creative, and weird nature of game development.
Comfortable working with individuals like Warren Spector and discerning between musings and directives.
Experience with immersive sims as a player, with the ability to clearly articulate the genre's defining characteristics.
Strong decision-making skills in situations with conflicting feedback and entrenched ideas.
Hands-on Unreal Engine 5 experience at an implementation level.

Nice To Haves

Experience working on games with systemic gameplay, emergent player choice, stealth, exploration, RPG systems, branching mission structures, or other complex design spaces.
Experience leading design teams through early development, prototyping, pre-production, or major feature definition.

Responsibilities

Lead a team of designers across multidisciplinary areas, working closely with leadership.
Take ownership of the Game Design Document (GDD) and roadmap, ensuring they are accurate, organized, current, and helpful for the team.
Manage design ownership, align documentation and roadmap planning with game direction, and balance prototyping, R&D, feature/content development, and optimization.
Prepare milestone materials such as presentations, overviews, videos, and summaries.
Act as a sturdy 'wall' for ideas, pushing back when necessary but remaining open to new concepts.
Communicate design goals, decisions, and tradeoffs clearly to ensure alignment with Warren Spector's vision.
Mentor, coach, support career development, manage workload, and help experienced designers do great work.
Champion design quality through honest, collaborative feedback, fostering a candid, critical, useful, and kind review culture.
Identify design needs, staffing gaps, process issues, and other potential risks.
Collaborate with other disciplines to validate designs, pressure test ideas, and ensure designs are feasible.
Jump into prototypes and testing to prove design concepts, tune features, and gather learnings.
Represent the game internally and externally as a champion for the project, the design team, and player experience.