We are looking for a talented Senior Game Designer for our Idle Games initiatives at Kongregate! Ideally, you will be able to come to our sunny San Diego office once the pandemic is over, but we are open to a full-time remote option for the right person. Our Idle Games team is working on building new and innovative variations on the idle genre, exploring exciting opportunities with top tier IPs, and working with external teams to experiment on variations of our core game mechanics.

As a Senior Game Designer, you will collaborate with our product management team to gather product requirements and in-game data to help you make optimal decisions for the game. You’ll get to manage system, economy, and UX design for games developed and operated by our Idle Games studio; this role will also be responsible for managing components of the production process as part of their daily duties.

Diving into economy spreadsheets and designing interesting new user experiences and features is your bread and butter. As a seasoned designer with in-depth experience across all design disciplines, you feel comfortable taking ownership as needed. As a leader, you know how to put an emphasis on collaborative development and are skilled at training others.

You always follow up and enjoy working within a fast-paced, team-oriented environment. Seeing your new designs in action excites you. You are the game and player’s advocate, but have a keen eye for the business implications, continually striving to strike a balance between the two. You keep playing your games obsessively, looking for points of improvement.

Responsibilities:

Manage all aspects of game design with the ability to deep dive into any of them as needed, understanding how each one impacts the game.
Drive thematic narratives, features and events from concept through development, test markets and post-launch optimization.
Design core game mechanics, balance economy systems and tune player progression for maximum player experience.
Create and manage design documentation including product requirements, UI / UX flows and mockups. Communicate requirements to engineering and QA.
Define the statistics of the systems with the development and product team, and understand how each of them contributes to the game dynamics.
Analyze the evolution of the metrics defined to come up with improvement suggestions and / or opportunities.
Regularly play both our games and the competition to stay current with market trends, identify opportunities, and continuously find ways to improve our games.
Report and share benchmarks, best practices and findings to key stakeholders.
Become the game’s advocate without losing sight of the business.

You Have:

6 years of relevant work experience in the games industry required, including 2 or more years of experience as a senior designer in a free-to-play environment.
Proficiency with Excel and Google spreadsheets.
A knack for wireframing. Able to quickly mock up design concepts and flows via standard tools.
Knowledge of the free-to-play market, top performers, best practices, and common systems across genres.
Passion for games at all levels and formats.
Familiar with the top idle games in the market, their strengths and how to bring innovation to the genre.
Sensitivity to gameplay and design, understanding how to build needs and emotions in the context of a game.
Analytical skills and ability to to break down complex problems into their key variables and identify the relations between them.
Econometric skills and statistical knowledge. Able to model problems into quantitative systems and formulate ratios and indexes specific to each game, identifying weaknesses and strengths in its economy design.
Passion for polished products and user experiences.
Experience managing priorities across different teams and projects.
A proactive, tenacious, can-do attitude.

RELATED COMPETENCIES

Creative Orientation — leveraging an ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, and relationships to create meaningful new ideas, processes, products, and general solutions to relevant business opportunities.
Entrepreneurship — using one’s understanding of the consumer market to create and seize business opportunities, expand into new markets, and launch innovative products and services.
Planning and Organizing — establishing courses of action of self and others to ensure that work is completed efficiently.
Analytical Acumen — examining problems, situations, opportunities, and data to identify causes, key factors, and potential outcomes with the desire to improve overall business results.

Perks

401K Plan with Company Match
Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life and long term disability insurance
Ample vacation days, PTO, and Paid Family Leave
Company wide events, game nights, happy hours and more (all of which are currently virtual)!
Build awesome games with premier IP holders.

COVID Note

Due to the on-going pandemic, Kongregate is operating as a fully remote company until further notice. All interviews will be conducted via phone and video calls.

This position is for our San Diego office (currently remote); with possibility of F/T remote, post-pandemic.

Kongregate is an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.