About This Role
Leading the design of all games developed or serviced by Koolhaus Games is the core of this role. The Lead Designer provides and maintains the overall vision for products, ensuring they align with the studio's strategic goals. This position suits an experienced game designer with strong leadership and communication skills.
Responsibilities
- Take responsibility for the successful design of assigned projects
- Create an overall vision for products, in conjunction with the studio leadership group
- Stay up to date with the current state of game design in the industry
- Effectively communicate the vision for the project to the rest of the team
- Understand core game mechanics and how to incorporate them into the larger project
- Understand the current market as it relates to F2P games as a service (acquisition, retention, and monetization)
- Craft well-designed apps and games for a variety of genres and demographics
- Effectively communicate and “sell” your vision and direction
- Initiate and support an all-encompassing, cross-discipline creative team environment
- Understand what is possible artistically and technologically
- Work with artists and programmers to ensure proper implementation of game features as designed
- Oversee the creation and maintenance of all design-related documentation
- Work with the studio leadership to develop project specifications that define the scope of the project, requirements of the prototype, and deliverables of milestones
- Provide career management and mentoring for designers with different levels of experience
- Organize and direct a team of game designers
- Ensure that the design team’s work environment is healthy and facilitates a high degree of creativity and productivity
- Help settle project-related design conflicts and disputes
- Manage a talented creative team of game designers
Requirements
- Excellent communicator
- Full understanding of ARM: acquisition, retention, and monetization
- Demonstrated expert-level ability to generate core game mechanics, core loops, meta game, story, functionality, and other aspects of game design
- Able to multi-task, designing multiple projects across multiple genres
- Strong critical thinking skills
- Excellent leadership, time-management, and delegation skills
- Solid knowledge of the game design and development process
- Strong documentation skills
- Expert familiarity with MS Office tools (Word, Excel, Powerpoint)
- Minimum of 4 years working in the digital media industry as a Lead or Senior designer at either the developer or publisher level
