Lead Game Designer

We are working with a client now searching for a Game Design Lead to join them and define, unify and drive the playable vision of a third-person action-adventure game. This is a senior hands-on design leadership role for someone who can invent mechanics, connect systems, shape player experience, and turn scattered ideas into a coherent direction the team can build against.

The strongest candidate is not merely a systems tuner, documentation writer, or design manager. We need someone with a toy-first / mechanics-first approach: identify what is fun, expressive, surprising, and repeatable at the interaction level, then connect that core to combat, exploration, progression, encounters, and level structure.

What We Are Hiring For

• A creative design lead who can help invent the playable identity, not just maintain someone else's vision.
• A designer who can pull together mechanics, combat, exploration, progression, levels, enemies, objectives, and player goals into one coherent experience.
• Someone who can devise missing pieces when the design is incomplete and make clear choices when the field is too broad.
• A practical senior collaborator who can write specs, graybox, review prototypes, and guide implementation with engineering, art, animation, and level layout contributors.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the game's playable design vision, including what belongs in the game and what does not.
• Invent, select, and refine mechanics that create a distinctive player experience rather than simply borrowing from other games.
• Connect combat, exploration, progression, level structure, enemies, abilities, and objectives into a coherent action-adventure framework.
• Create or review graybox spaces, gameplay layouts, combat arenas, traversal routes, and exploration structures.
• Write clear, practical design specs that engineers, artists, animators, and designers can act on.
• Review implemented features and prototypes; identify whether problems are tuning, implementation, scope, or core design issues.
• Represent design priorities in planning and help choose the smallest playable proof that demonstrates the game's promise.

If this is of interest, please apply here and also send a copy of your CV to michael@levelupgaming.io and I will get back to you. It's likely a relatively recent portfolio of your work will be needed to compete here.