As the Game Director at Liminal you will creatively shape the future of UGC by driving the design direction of the product and organization. You will be critical to making the product vision a reality and unlocking performance from our talented team of developers.
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 your creative influence on every aspect of the product.
Responsibilities
- Vision.
- Direct the overall vision for Liminal’s product and player experience. Keep the overarching product vision alive as it takes shape through the efforts of many contributors and stakeholders.
- Synthesize, maintain, and articulate Liminal’s design principles in order to empower each team member to make autonomous decisions consistent with our design philosophy.
- Drive the design and implementation of key features while synthesizing ideas from across the team.
- Strategy.
- Drive Liminal’s overall creative strategy.
- Identify and prioritize design challenges and formulate strategy in partnership with the rest of Liminal leadership.
- Leadership.
- Shape the design organization at Liminal by owning staffing needs, leading hiring panels, debriefings, and onboarding.
- Drive excellence across design by defining and iterating on design processes.
- Support a culture of growth by managing and mentoring design staff to their full potential.
- Craft.
- Innovate in designing a UGC experience for every aspect of an action-adventure game: story, game design, character, environment, and more.
- Maintain a high quality bar for all aspects of product design.
- Provide constructive feedback and high-level direction to designers, engineers, artists, and other developers.
- Teamwide Buff.
- 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
- 8+ years of hands-on game design experience.
- 3+ years experience leading design teams.
- Demonstrated portfolio of player-facing design work in shipped products.
- Track record of leading a game from experimental concept to launch.
- Demonstrated record of integrating cutting-edge and transformational technologies into innovative game or product designs.
- Experience managing designers at various career stages and with diverse specializations.
- Deep experience with rapid prototyping strategy (problem decomposition and prototyping scoping) and execution (design and evaluation).
- Keen eye for elegance in design. You can synthesize ambitious and potentially sprawling feature visions and distill them into minimal, practical, and user-friendly designs. Ability to balance the details with the big picture.
- Ability to clearly explain and document ideas.
- Excellent interdisciplinary communication, collaboration, and facilitation skills.
- Keen ability to elicit and perceive the talents, interests, and growth potential of individual contributors and then apply this information towards staffing and strategy.
- Comfort with navigating ambiguity and articulating and evangelizing effective strategies for surmounting design challenges.
- Top-notch 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.
- 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.
- Bonus: Proven leadership in designing and shipping player-facing authorial/UGC tools.
- Bonus: Experience integrating cutting-edge and transformational technologies into innovative game or product designs.
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