Senior Systems Designer

Liminal Experiences
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Posted
March 5, 2024
Full Time
Pacific Time
Remote

As Senior Systems Designer at Liminal, you will be in charge of designing the systems foundation of the Liminal creative environment. You will touch every aspect of the game—character, story, quest, world, gameplay—and ensure that the underlying system architecture offers players a beautiful set of building blocks, like Lego bricks, that are easy to use, delightful to play with, and creatively expressive.

At Liminal, we believe that good ideas can come from anywhere. You will join a team of other low-ego developers eager to learn from your experiences and will partner across disciplines in an environment where engineers and artists will be enthusiastic about you contributing creatively to every aspect of the product.

 

Responsibilities

  • Systems Innovation.
    • Synthesize, articulate, and maintain an overarching vision for Liminal’s system architecture.
    • Own the underlying system design of Liminal’s player-facing component system (which encompasses all gameplay behaviors), quest system, character system, narrative system, and more.
    • Advocate for authorial ease-of-use, expressivity, and adventure gameplay quality.
    • Keep Liminal’s overarching system design simple, coherent, and on track as it is realized through the efforts of many contributors and stakeholders.
    • Be able to articulate the design principles underlying your system design work so that the entire team understands not just what, but why.
    • Innovate in system design. Our system should represent elegant editing of traditional action-adventure system elements (like combat) as well as elements like story and character personality.
  • Strategy & Execution.
    • Identify and prioritize design problems and drive solutions to completion by working with the game director to form creative strategy, pitch designs and drive prototyping, solicit stakeholder feedback, and iterate.
    • Collaborate with cross-functional teams including game designers, artists, and programmers to ensure the seamless integration of game systems into the overall game design
    • Work with stakeholders from across disciplines and product areas, gathering good ideas and synthesizing and articulating the results.
    • Be hands on in the implementation and tweaking of features with a willingness to engage with the tools provided by the engineering team
  • Teamwide Buff.
    • Set a high quality bar for elegant system design in all aspects of the product.
    • Provide constructive feedback to other designers and engineers, artists, and other developers.
    • Mentor junior designers.
    • Contribute to an environment that fosters innovation, and helps others take smart risks, learn from failures, and own the outcomes.
    • Ensure that results do not come at the expense of long-term growth, retention, or psychological safety at the company.
    • Model the Liminal values and support teammates in doing the same.

 

Skills

  • 5+ years of hands-on game design experience with a strong focus on system design, especially in RPG titles or UGC platforms
  • Demonstrated portfolio of player-facing design work in shipped products.
  • Track record of system design, ideally from experimental concept to launch.
  • Extensive experience with rapid prototyping.
  • Self Aware: Self-awareness and a willingness to connect with others with empathy
  • Feedback Oriented: Proactively ask for feedback from others to develop awareness about strengths, and act on development areas
  • Growth Oriented: Invests time in being a better designer and leader.
  • Excellent interdisciplinary communication, collaboration, and facilitation skills.
  • Ability to make complex systems easily understood by everybody on our team as well as our end users. Must be able to explain and document complex ideas in simple prose and pictures.
  • Comfort with navigating a profound level of ambiguity and solving challenging system design challenges with complex tradeoffs.
  • Keen eye for elegance in design. You can synthesize ambitious and potentially sprawling feature visions and distill them into minimal, practical, and user-friendly system designs. Ability to balance the details with the big picture.
  • Solid interaction design skills. You are excited about transforming complex and difficult experiences into simple, fun, and easy-to-use toys.
  • Fluency with action-adventure game design conventions.
  • Bonus: Experience designing and shipping player-facing authorial/UGC tools.
  • Bonus: Experience integrating cutting-edge and transformational technologies into innovative game or product designs.
About 
Liminal Experiences

We believe that everyone has an imagination worth igniting. Liminal is a new UGC game for creating narrative action role-playing games with the vision of making the world a more creative place. By delivering a joyful creation experience, we aim to go beyond a niche audience of modders to usher in a new era of immersive storytelling. We are building for storytellers and adventurers with two intertwined game modes, a fun-to-create core loop paired with inherently social adventure gameplay.

Liminal is hiring experienced developers who want to partner with other passionate game makers to bring the joy of creation to players by defining a new paradigm for player creativity and are excited to do so in an enthusiastic, compassionate, high-empathy environment. We are a fully remote studio and work Pacific Time hours.

 

Our Values 

Respect the Power of Story

Storytelling matters

  • Stories connect people and transform culture‍
  • Everyone has an imagination worth igniting‍
  • A story doesn’t have to appeal to you personally to be taken seriously‍
  • We celebrate creative acts of all types, crafters, writers, anyone who brings something new and creative into the world

 

Create Joyfully

The joy we bring to our work will be reflected in our game

  • We laugh together, celebrate success together, and lift each other up‍
  • When hard days come we support each other with vulnerability
  • We get a thrill from choosing to solve such hard problems

 

Bring a Humble Brain

Psychological safety and low-egos make the best products

  • If a mistake is made on our team, it is not held against you
  • Room to fail gives us space to take risks
  • The best answer is the one that is best for players, regardless of who it comes from

 

Collaborate with Compassion

We're all human and we seek to support each other

  • Invest in each other's growth
  • Talk to people, not about people
  • Have awkward conversations
  • Assume good intent, open a dialogue to clarify when needed

 

Make Space for 1000 Faces

Diverse heroes make beautiful stories

  • Diverse perspectives make for better companies and better products
  • We will protect marginalized voices in our community
  • We make space for everyone’s point of view at work
  • We all share responsibility for the work of inclusion

 

Be the Protagonist

We're all main characters in this adventure

  • Everyone at Liminal can advance the story without having to be asked, taking ownership of problems and focusing on impact‍
  • We communicate clearly and follow through on our commitments
  • Heroes never win alone, we ask for help when we are stuck
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