We are VoxRay Games, a small independent game studio working on VOXILE, an FPS-RPG-Survival game built in a custom raytraced voxel game engine.

We are looking for a Level Designer to help us build amazing new worlds. Our ideal candidate has a balanced skillset of visual design, level and quest design, and technical scripting skills.

What you will do

You will design both gameplay and geometry for medium-sized gameplay worlds. These worlds are often bigger and more open than a typical “level”, but smaller than the vast open worlds common in today’s games. Imagine 2-3 hours worth of gameplay packed in an area of up to 1 square kilometer.

Our game gives the level designer a great deal of flexibility and freedom in how a world plays: by changing what monsters, items, quests, and locations you populate a world with, it may play more like a shooter, an RPG, or a survival game… or even something a little different. But with great power comes great responsibility: you are also responsible for balancing the gameplay in that world, encouraging creative problem solving, and crafting quest designs and story to keep the player interested.

We have a wonderful and lightning-quick editor that allows you to combine voxel models of various shapes and sizes and materials to flesh out a world. Our programming team works quickly and closely with our designers to make sure they have what they need. 

You will also work with artists to get new sets of modular voxel art for use in your worlds, and with the Lead Designer to ensure that your worlds are in keeping with the broader vision, but also unique from any other experience we might offer.

What we’re looking for

We’re looking for a level designer with demonstrable experience in both visual design and gameplay balance / quest design. Someone who is highly motivated to plan the possible paths of the player, populate it with interesting things to find and exciting challenges to overcome, and keep tweaking it until it is maximum fun.

Our ideal candidate is a very self-driven individual: you will be responsible for a world, and drive it forward in whatever way is needed. While we meet regularly and you have the support of a dedicated design lead, we’re also a small and fully-remote team – this means communication, time management, and getting help will often require your initiative.

Our ideal candidate will also need to demonstrate some technical skill. You will need to be able to design quests, NPC interactions, puzzles, loot, and more using our bespoke Action Editor scripting system. On the day-to-day, you’ll also use MagicaVoxel for making assets, Git for version control, and text editors for editing metadata json files.

Job parameters

• This job is fully remote.
• We accept applications from anywhere in the world, though we will have a preference for proximity to US timezones.
• Excellent written and spoken English communication skills required.
• Employment is initially on an hourly, contract basis, but there is a possibility for full-time employment (with benefits) down the line, particularly for US applicants, as VoxRay Games grows.
• Hourly rate up for discussion, depending on experience and many other factors.
• The number of hours you work is flexible, within reason. We likely wouldn’t want you to work less than 20 hours a week (for it to be worth it for us to work with you as a team member), and we don’t want you to overwork yourself >50 hrs a week, but in between you can often pick your own balance, working less one week, more another week. Take an afternoon off if you need to, or inspiration doesn’t strike, that kind of thing. Work into the night if the voxels are flowing. You do you.
• The team size is currently around ten people. You’ll report to the lead designer; Aside from that, we’re a small team without a lot of hierarchy.
• Tools we use:
  • As an LD, you’ll be mostly working with in-engine tools.
  • MagicaVoxel.
  • VSCode.
  • Git / GitHub <- used for all our issue tracking, wiki etc.
  • Discord for team chat and video meetings.
  • You will have to be using a Windows machine with a recent/fast GPU.

How to apply

While we want to see your portfolio pieces, we’d also like to make sure we understand your contribution and your strengths and how they applied to that work.  What did you aim for the player to experience? How did you manage the visual design, what gameplay elements did you balance, and how did you bring those contributions together with story and quest elements?

So, please pick one or several of your portfolio pieces, and explain in some detail what you did for them and why, along the topics above, then send it to us in an email.

Use additional screenshots or even video to help explain your process as needed.

If we like your application, we’ll schedule an interview or two. If the interviews go well, we’ll discuss having you perform a design test with our tools.