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.