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Our new game is about the mesmerizing experience of interacting with wild animals.
We're looking for a designer who wants to think deeply about questions like "what helps make an interaction feel weirdly alive? Or unsettling? Or intimate?" and is ready to explore those questions by building gameplay prototypes. Our goal is to create gameplay that feels squishy, intimate, and strange. Like a grub crawling on a hand, a starfish waving its arms, or a lizard emerging from its shell but filtered through an aesthetic that includes classic fairytales, Jim Henson, and Junji Ito.
Making a game about animal interactions is tricky because a lot of the challenges scale up very quickly. Animals are ludicrously complicated in terms of their behavior, physics, rendering, sound design, and animation, among other things. We're hoping that you're senior AND curious enough to have had experience with a wide variety of game systems because most of our hard problems are very interdisciplinary.
As the game's senior designer you'll have two major responsibilities. First, single-handedly building initial gameplay prototypes to explore potential directions. And second, you'll coordinate and guide the rest of the team as they flesh out the early prototypes created by you and other designers.
We want our interactions to feel as lifelike as possible but we also don't want to spend the next two years making one seagull. Ideally you've learned some hard lessons on previous projects and can push us to ruthlessly cut things players aren't going to notice while advocating for the big swings and little touches that help create memorable moments.
You should be someone with a strong interest in using gameplay to evoke emotion and with the technical skills to single-handedly build 3D gameplay prototypes. They don't have to be beautiful, just emotionally expressive.
What you'll do here
Must haves
Nice to haves
This role could be fully remote or you can join us in Los Angeles if you'd like.
If you think you'd be a good fit, please fill out the application form.
Giant Sparrow is a small video game company focused on creating surreal experiences people have never had before. Our dream is to make the world a stranger, more interesting place. We're based in Los Angeles, CA.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a collection of short stories about a cursed family in Washington State. Each story offers a chance to explore the life of a different family member and ends with their death. The goal is to create an experience that encourages players to feel humbled and astonished by the vast and unknowable world around us.
The Unfinished Swan is a game about exploring the unknown. The player is a young boy chasing after a swan who has wandered off into a surreal, unfinished kingdom. The game begins in a completely white space where players can throw paint to splatter their surroundings and reveal the world around them.
We’ve been lucky to have some incredible jobs working at and partnering with some of the biggest brands in video games.
But we’ve never had more fun and been more fulfilled than when we were working with indie game developers.
Everyone in games should have that much fun.
Our hope is that Work With Indies will connect job seekers with the most rewarding, most inspirational, and most fun jobs they've ever had.
