Lead Designer, World

Description

SUMMARY OF POSITION

For over 20 years Monolith has been obsessed with delivering unique gaming experiences for our fans. Combining innovative gameplay, cutting edge technology and AI, inventive narratives and stunning visuals to create award winning and best-selling games. Starting with our first game, Blood through to our most recent title, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor which has been awarded with numerous Game of the Year Awards, including Gamespot, Joystiq and IGN as well as Best Action/Adventure Game at the 2014 Game Awards.

We are dedicated to ensuring that our next game is our best yet, and to achieve that we need the best and brightest talent the industry has to offer.

Monolith Productions seeks a Lead Designer, World who will be responsible for working with the design, environment art, and technical art team to define level construction standards, metrics and best practices. Through the use of proprietary and 3rd party tools, you will create examples of these standards for the rest of the design and art team, then work to ensure shipping levels are iterating in the right direction to capture the experience goals. The Lead Designer, World is responsible for collaborating with the rest of the design team, artists, and engineers to ensure that everyone has clear expectations for level construction and workflows are documented and clearly communicated to the team.

JOB RESPONSIBILITIES

• Work with the Design and Art leadership to identify Gameplay and Aesthetic goals, and propose solutions that live within the technical constraints of our proprietary technology. Ensure shipping levels are meeting all goals while iterating throughout the development cycle.
• Mentor the designers and artists working on world construction focused on workflow improvements and implementation details, providing regular feedback on their work and workflow.
• Work with the Design and Technical Art team to define, document and communicate Design requirements focused on providing metrics to the world construction team. Such as scale standards, Gameplay space requirements, memory and performance related level construction best practices.
• Work with the Production, Design Leads and the Technical Artists to deconstruct the level construction process, to establish measurable development phases with specified goals.
• Create and maintain living documentation detailing the level construction process and standards that keeps pace with the project's progress and accurately conveys all necessary information to dependant teams.
• Work with the technology team on workflow improvements for the world construction team.
  

JOB REQUIREMENTS

• Associate degree or equivalent job experience preferred.
• 8+ years of game design, environment art, and/or technical art experience required.
• Shipped at least 3 console/PC titles as a designer or equivalent, with at least one of those being in the 3rd person action/adventure genre.
• An understanding of gameplay flow and systems.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to work collaboratively with programmers, artists, and other designers.
• Expertise in a variety of editors required.
• Comprehensive knowledge of game design and world construction principles, the computer gaming industry and its products.
• Professional experience working with level design on a large-scale project.
• Effectively work under the pressure of competing demands and short time lines.
• Willing to commit to the team in terms of time & effort given.

The Warner Bros. Entertainment Group of Companies is an equal opportunity employer and considers all candidates for employment regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, citizenship, age, disability, marital status, military or veteran's status (including protected veterans, as may be required by federal law), sexual orientation or any other category protected by law.