Description
Location - London/Remote
The Lead Narrative Designer is responsible for the narrative of a dedicated mobile game IP, providing guidance, direction and consistency to ensure interactive narrative content meets audience, product and brand requirements. This could be on our flagship Love Island product, or on an original IP in development. You will oversee a team of writers and seniors and ensure their work is aligned with the wider product and business goals. You will be experienced with managing and guiding a team of writers, who themselves work on individual projects or pieces of content for the IP.
Work will involve close collaboration with product, production and data teams, managing relationships with IP owners, producing editorial insights and guidelines to structure work, performing player and audience research, greenlighting story ideas, and taking ultimate responsibility for ensuring that the studio's narrative output is high quality and fits the requirements of the product and the studio's strategic aims more generally. This role will create a context for the Senior Narrative Designers to focus on their craft, while providing them with all the input needed to do their work to the best of their ability.
Additionally, the Lead Narrative Designer writer will oversee and participate in a variety of departmental activities associated with growing and developing a skilled team of writers, such as running training activities, seminars, and participating in D&I initiatives such as mentorship schemes.
Responsibilities
- Sets the creative standards and guidelines for narrative team within an IP.
- Owns narrative relationships/partnerships with IP partners.
- Works with seniors to align output of writers with game and product requirements.
- Develops and delivers content strategy across IP. Ensures all work undertaken in the department is informed by clearly-expressed guidelines and insights from Product and Data, and that the team understand these insights.
- Creates briefs for new content, to be actioned by Senior Narrative Designers.
- Performs research and uses data to validate or inform content strategy.
- Manages process of defining and greenlighting content.
- Ensures insight from reviews/postmortems and input from game design/product team is integrated into future work.
- Coordinates with production teams on schedules, times, and priorities.
- Line manages Senior Narrative Designs.
Skills and Requirements
- Worked on and shipped multiple digital, interactive narrative projects, ideally in interactive gaming space.
- Extensive experience in a similar role, managing multiple pieces of content either within games or in other industries.
- Experience leading creation of narrative content for multiple IPs or brands.
- Experience in aligning project style with audience, and communicating it to a team of other writers or content producers.
- Experience delivering to set deadlines and stakeholder requirements.
- Experience creating concept work, prototypes, pitches and proposals for new ideas, illustrated with past experience and portfolio work.
- Experience taking a project from concept stage, through development, to release.
- Experience leading writers, supporting their growth and delivery of projects to quality and time standards.
**REQUIRED: Please submit a link to your portfolio or projects you have worked on**
Nice to Have
- Experience in recruitment and growth of writing teams.
- Proven experience of mentoring junior colleagues or or external writers using a structured mentorship programme.
- Experience working with narrative and KPIs in the F2P space.
- Expert understanding of how story is used in mobile free-to-play games.
- Knowledge of the F2P mobile narrative market, particularly games that compete directly with Fusebox products.
About You
- Collaborative! You are happy synthesising a variety of different inputs from people with different backgrounds, and finding solutions that suit everyone.
- Compassionate! You care about telling stories that have the potential to really speak to people, and approach collaboration with empathy and consideration.
- Curious! You take inspiration from all sorts of places, and you've got some cool ideas about what the Next Big Thing might be.
- Inclusive! You believe in championing diversity and inclusion both in the way that you work, and in the content you create.
- Objective! You seek reliable, visible, data-driven approaches to decision making, and can always show your working.
- Organised! You document your work as you go, and you know where your pencil sharpener is.
About Fusebox Games
At Fusebox Games we make world-leading choice-based narrative mobile games that live in your pocket. Our mobile games let you choose your story, wherever you are. Fusebox Games came to life in 2016 and has since rapidly become a market leader in mobile Interactive Narrative. Fusebox Games published the interactive narrative games X Factor Life and Love Island The Game in 2018 which has consistently hit the top spot in both UK and US charts. We are now exploring other original stories, and are ambitiously expanding and evolving our world class team of 40+ developers. Come join us and create your own story at Fusebox Games.
We are dedicated to promoting and valuing diversity in our company and in our games and welcome and encourage applications from all backgrounds. Be yourself and help us create stories that are unforgettable!
Why should you join Fusebox?
- Responsible & open development ethos
- Support and training for diverse workforce
- Fusebox 'Culture Club'
- Reactive and listening management
- Regular social events and get togethers
Benefits
- Up to 3% employer pension contribution
- Private Health Care insurance with Vitality
- Employee Assistance Program with Health Assured
- Flexible working
- Family friendly leave
- Eye care vouchers
- 23 days holiday plus bank holidays and 4 days Christmas break closure
- Season ticket loan
- Cycle to work Scheme
- Personal development annual training budget
- Duvet Days
- Annual milestone reward
- Quarterly team lunches
- Friday afternoon beers/'unwind' time
Note: This job description is not exhaustive and will be subject to periodic review. It may be amended to meet the changing needs of the business. The post-holder will be expected to participate in this process and we would aim to reach agreement on any changes.
