Game Designer

Job Description

Locations: This is a fully remote position, available across most European locations.

Welcome to Maxis, home to tinkerers, craftspeople, & storytellers. Our drive is to inspire everyone to make a better world through creative play. As the developer of The Sims, we create games and experiences for millions of people around the world and are always looking for new ways to inspire our players. Maxis is a place where you can do what you love and help others grow while doing it; a place where your unique voice can be heard and seen. We put creativity and inclusivity at the core of our work and don't settle for seeing the world only as it is, but strive to build a world as it could be. Read on to see how you can join our team and dream big.

As a Game Designer on The Sims 4, you'll work with a team of enthusiastic industry craftspeople from all walks of life. You will use your passion and knowledge to design player-first experiences that surprise, delight, and invite millions of Simmers around the world to Play with Life.

You will report into our European Senior Development Director.

Responsibilities
• Improve the quality of life for our players by continual improvement to existing content.
• Design systems, mechanics, and content from concept through implementation to completion.
• Determine gameplay experience goals for designs, and tune features to meet those goals.
• Improve designs based on input from the team, user research and playtesting, game metrics, and sound systems design practices.
• Become knowledgeable about the game and our community, drawing from our large, varied player base and our past games to make and defend intelligent design choices going forward.
• Be proficient in Maxis' proprietary game designer development tools to implement your designs, tune, and bug fix.
• Think about the future when implementing content, resulting in smartly scripted scalable systems and good design patterns and practices.
• Find practical and creative solutions that achieve the intended player experience and fit within the project scope.
• Collaborate with all team disciplines, including artists, animators, modelers, engineers, quality assurance, and producers to get support from the team and guide a project from initial design to final production.
• Mentor more junior members of the design team and provide feedback on ways they can grow.
• Help identify gaps on the team and propose solutions for how the team might solve them.

Qualifications
• Mid-Career: 4-6 years of game design experience on a video game development team.
• Experience with game development tools and engines such as Unity, Unreal, or proprietary engines.
• Implemented designs in past games using scripts, XLM/JSON, blueprints, or in an editor.
• Excellent creative, analytical, and organizational skills with an ability to write detailed design documentation throughout a project life cycle.
• Progressive thinking while remaining energetic and motivated to overcome challenges with practical solutions.
• Interest in pushing boundaries and telling inclusive human stories through systems and thematic storytelling
• Champion a design and get the team excited to work on it.
• Experience prioritizing multiple tasks.
• Experience using a variety of scripting solutions to implement, tune, and bug-fix features.
• Become proficient in multiple proprietary development tools.
• Sense of ownership and responsibility.
• Design and implementation experience with game features that focus on open-ended player creativity.
• Effective at working both autonomously and in groups of different profiles.
• Knowledge of and enthusiasm for gaming: playing, deconstructing, and creating.
• Comfortable with long timelines within a live operations environment.
• Experience with games in The Sims PC franchise and other simulation games.

Desirable Skills
• Technical design, scripting or engineering background.
• Desire to lead a vision.
• Experience with simulation games.
• Worked on a AAA HD title.
• Worked on a large team.
• Experience in LiveOps environment.
• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent.
• Comfortable with Google Drive: Docs, Sheets, and Slides; Miro, Visio, JIRA, Perforce or Git, and online collaboration suites such as Confluence and Slack.

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-gww2m2-3-17-68-14-42 in your application.