At Hinterland, we strive to create powerfully immersive worlds where our players can experience the joy of exploration. These fictional worlds are created with a strong sense of “world story”, which gives them a feeling of verisimilitude for our players. We believe that excellent interactive entertainment is driven by a blend of carefully authored traditional narrative elements layered on top of rich systems-driven gameplay tools, so that players both experience the feeling of living in a world while also directly impacting it through their own actions. This creates a strong sense of personal ownership within a thoughtfully curated narrative framework.

For us, Narrative Design is not only about writing or storytelling in a traditional sense, but about employing an array of gameplay tools in novel ways, and ensuring those tools interact with narrative systems to create an interactive experience that is unique to the medium of video games. We are not simply trying to make small cinematic films within our games; we want to engage our players in ways that no non-interactive medium can hope to achieve.

The Narrative Design Lead is responsible for working with cross-disciplinary teams to conceive of, design, document, implement, test, and deliver forward-thinking narrative systems that engage our players in meaningful and lasting ways. This is as much a technical role as it is a creative one. You need to understand the deep interplay between gameplay and narrative, have mastered a wide array of tools used to author content, and be comfortable sitting at the cross-section of authored and player narrative. This is not a role for writers or narrative experts who have not worked within a truly interactive medium, or without extensive experience using tools for game content authoring including engines like Unity and Unreal.

No TV/film screenwriters please, unless you have also written game content and been responsible for integrating it into an interactive experience!

Some examples of features or tasks you might be responsible for as a Narrative Design Lead include (please note these are just examples and should not be taken as an indication of planned game features or direction):

• Dialogue systems that enable players to have a meaningful impact on the outcome of game tasks.
• Character creators that hook directly into core gameplay systems to align player expression with play style or gameplay outcomes.
• In collaboration with animators and technical animators, lead the technical design of systems for non-cinematic narrative presentation, including AI behaviour, facial animation systems, and choreography.
• Design and implementation of AI bark systems that balance communicating gameplay feedback while also presenting authentic and naturalistic narrative content.
• Working in collaboration with the creative director to map out core narrative content for the intended player experience and plan for how it will be implemented and delivered through game systems.
• Help plan, supervise, and/or direct motion capture shoots or voice sessions, to ensure quality, narrative continuity, and that the needs of the player experience are being met, while delivering the creative director’s vision for the game’s narrative.

This is a senior role, and the ideal candidate has 7+ years of experience delivering high-quality narrative content for award-winning video games. In addition to the above, being an excellent published writer is definitely a “nice to have”. While part of your role at Hinterland might also involve supporting the writing of game content (scripts, dialogue, AI barks, character or world backgrounders, etc.), this role is primarily focused on the technical and creative implementation and integration of narrative content in the game.

Along with your application and cover letter, please include a short (one-page) description outlining your approach to interactive narrative, with some concrete examples of how you have supported this approach with content you have contributed to shipped projects you have been a part of. Please note that we are not filling this role based on a candidate’s writing experience, but rather, their experience in narrative design. Finding a very strong narrative designer who also happens to be an excellent writer would be a lovely outcome.

Please note that Hinterland is a no-crunch studio and we expect our team members to have a healthy balance between their work and life. While COVID is still an active threat, we are working in a fully remote environment, but our hope is to gradually bring people together in our physical studio on regular monthly intervals starting in 2022 provided it is safe to do so. We prioritize employee health and safety over token notions of on-site collaboration, but we also highly value the importance of regular face-to-face collaboration to strengthen the bonds that make a great and effective team. Long-term, we will settle in to a blend of primarily offsite work with scheduled on-site time working out of our studio in Vancouver. Therefore, all candidates must be available to participate in this scheduled on-site collaboration as fully remote work is not compatible with our philosophy or approach.