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Starchild is looking to hire for two entry-level roles:
… to help us develop a virtual pet game for the iPhone inspired by Nintendogs and the Sony Aibo!
About the Project
We have two design goals. First, we want to launch a core game with a carefully scoped feature set. This feature set will initially be much smaller than that of e.g. Nintendogs. However, within that set of features, we want to meet or exceed Nintendogs in terms of quality of art and UX polish.
Second, building on top of that gameplay core, we want to experiment with features that make the dog come alive and be more interactive in a pro-social way.
For example, the ways in which you interact with the dog in Nintendogs are limited by the fact that you have a finite set of items and the environment is essentially fixed. What if we allowed players to customize their environment and the dog could react to changed environments? For example, using 3D reconstruction we could allow the player to import items from the real world into the game world.
We also want to experiment with multiplayer features: for example, a player’s friend’s dog might stop by and visit, inspiring the player reconnect with their friend.
More than anything it is imperative that the dog be as cute as possible >:)
We use:
Working With Us
The team consists of around 10 people, with 2 full-time programmers.
We are a small team so we expect you to be independent and responsible for driving projects to completion. Conversely, others on the team are expected to take it upon themselves to support and unblock you whenever possible, whether it be by making tooling, providing assets, or providing design review. Given a high-level task like "implement hide-and-seek," you should be able to chat with the rest of the team to determine requirements, propose a design and gather feedback, request required assets from artists, and iterate on the feature until it is ready to ship. You should be comfortable with making or locating placeholder assets to unblock yourself!
We think that we will need to experiment with a lot of different mechanics to figure out what sticks! So we are interested not just in programming proficiency but also creativity. If you have novel ideas for pet simulator games, we'd love to hear them!
We are fully remote. We have a Slack where people post short standups on the days that they work ("yesterday: did X, today: did Y") and host our code on GitHub. Once a week we have a one-hour meeting with most of the team; these are currently 9am Tuesday morning. Things are pretty async because of the different timezones and because many people are part-time.
For people working on the project full-time, we have a weekly 1-1 meeting to chat about stuff that's blocking you, to deliver feedback, and so on.
A Note on Credits
Regarding portfolio rights, once the game is launched, you should be able to put anything public on your portfolio. While it's still in progress, there are some technical details we'd like to keep secret. If there's something you'd like to put on your portfolio while the game is in progress, feel free to ask!
Our Approach to LLMs
Our policy is not to use AI for art or writing. We do use LLM-based coding assistants like Claude Code for engineering work, but expect engineers to take responsibility for all the code that they merge, which means that you should review and be able to justify what the LLM generates!
Compensation
We can do either full-time employment or contracting. We are currently bootstrapped and have at least one year of runway for the project. Compensation is negotiable; we would target $30/hr or $60,000/year, reflecting our current stage as a bootstrapped company. We do not currently offer health benefits unfortunately. We’d like to launch quickly so that we can revise the rate upwards. We believe that as a small company we offer an unusual level of product ownership and the chance to work on a more experimental project. Even if it flops hopefully it’ll be something you can brag about :P
We’ve been lucky to have some incredible jobs working at and partnering with some of the biggest brands in video games.
But we’ve never had more fun and been more fulfilled than when we were working with indie game developers.
Everyone in games should have that much fun.
Our hope is that Work With Indies will connect job seekers with the most rewarding, most inspirational, and most fun jobs they've ever had.
