/ Game Designer ( Potion Craft )

Game Designer For Potion Craft And Other Projects

We (niceplay games) are best known as the developers of the indie hit Potion Craft. Currently, this is our main project – we are working on updates, additions, new content, and features. We are also working on porting to various platforms.

We are a remote-first company with a culture based on trust and open and honest communication. We can make addictive games with unconventional gameplay, unique visual style, and (sometimes excessive) attention to detail – if you are close to this approach, you will like it here!

Who We Are Looking For

Our team needs an experienced and confident game designer for Potion Craft and other company projects.

The game has been in active development since 2019 and continues to evolve. Over time, it has grown with fundamental systems, documentation, guidelines, and tables, on the basis of which further design and balance will be built, and in the development of which you will also participate.

We want to find a cool specialist with extensive game development experience who will work directly with the game director and always be on the same wavelength with him. We need a self-reliant and responsible person who can be trusted with all the main work on Potion Craft game design – so that there is no need to double-check and worry that the work is not done as originally agreed. We are looking for a person for long-term cooperation, who will perfectly fit into the team in spirit and attitude towards games and development, to grow and develop together and make even cooler projects and features.

We are interested in people with different experience, and we are always open to constructive feedback and sharing of experience, so you can also participate in improving approaches to working with documentation and tables, improving debugging tools, and the format of working with other team members.

You will need to work with new content and features, texts, localization, balance, UX, controls, nuances of different platforms, resolving edge cases in design, polishing and fine-tuning controls and colliders, debugging in Unity, testing fresh builds of the game, and in general, be involved in forming new even cooler versions of the game and new projects, so there are many different interesting tasks ahead and a lot of potential for growth in various directions.

Examples Of Tasks

• Inventing and calculating the balance and patterns of new ingredients, as well as setting them up in the project.
• Designing and balancing new alchemical maps for new potion bases.
• Inventing and balancing new potion effects that will fit well into the world and have good potential for new customer orders.
• Inventing and inserting new customers, traders, and NPC classes into the game.
• Polishing and fine-tuning settings to improve the game feel and controls of new features and content. For example, fine-tuning colliders, speeds, easings, and other settings in Unity.
• Writing and formatting documentation and tasks for new features and content with subsequent maintenance and improvement.
• Suggesting rework or rebalancing of poorly performing features and mechanics.
• Creating new localization keys for new content and inserting localized keys into the game.
• R&D of new projects and prototypes.

Requirements

• Good familiarity with the game Potion Craft with a full understanding of all the main mechanics and understanding the value of certain decisions. If you are not interested in Potion Craft in its current form, we are unlikely to find common ground.
• Love for games and diverse gaming experience, which is constantly replenished. If you do not live by games, do not engage in constant analysis and other projects, do not follow the industry, and your experience over the past year consists of one GAAS game, we are not for you.
• Passion for development and a desire to create well-developed, high-quality games with a high attention to detail. If you live and work by the principle "it will do," we will not work together.
• Any projects, even if they are not completed (including personal hobby projects).
• Experience as a game designer, producer, or game director (on other or your own game projects).
• Experience in remote work and confidence that this format suits you.
• Willingness to accept the company's frameworks and values, as well as hierarchy, including in terms of game design. We highly value and try to give creative freedom, as well as encourage constructive discussion and feedback, but it is not a fact that all final decisions will coincide with your view at the moment (so if you want to get a job in a company with the idea of changing half of the game – this is a bad idea).
• Ability to write clear and well-structured texts.
• Ability to create clear and visual documentation with illustrations and taking into account various nuances and edge cases.
• Advanced skills in working with Google Sheets (ability to work with formulas, conditional formatting, charts, etc.).
• Good understanding of UI/UX (many tasks may be related to new interfaces, and we also pay special attention to pleasant UX in our games and development tools).
• Good knowledge of English (naming objects in the project and documentation, searching/understanding information in English sources, sometimes communicating with English-speaking colleagues from partner companies – porting companies, publisher, etc.).
• Currently, we are not considering work from Russia, but we can discuss options with relocation.
• Independence and self-organization.
• Honesty and openness.
• Ability to work within the guidelines and rules, as well as participate in their development.
• Ability and willingness to work in a team.

Pluses

• Experience participating in game jams.
• Experience developing games in Unity.
• Experience developing personal projects.
• Experience working in small teams.
• Experience working as a lead.
• Experience testing games.
• Experience working with graphic editors.
• Experience promoting and working with promotional materials.
• Knowledge of the company lore and the history of the game Potion Craft.
• Familiarity with various gaming platforms.
• Understanding of geometry, basic physics, and kinematics (many physical gameplay mechanics are used in our games).
• Technical background.
• Understanding and acceptance of modern technologies and tools.
• Product thinking.
• Developed cognitive empathy.
• Skills of a screenwriter/writer.
• Analytical mindset.
• Ability to work with Git.
• Initiative and desire to make the project better.

Pluses Of Working With Us

• We make games well and in good faith.
• Friendly atmosphere built on trust.
• We value initiative and are open to suggestions and feedback from each team member.
• Variety of tasks – you will not feel like you are standing still. The project is constantly evolving, and new challenges appear every time.
• You will see progress – both with small and quite large tasks. Once every two months, we summarize the results and gather a new build that the whole team can play.
• Optimal project size: it is neither a small game for a couple of months, nor a long-term project that is being developed for 5 years without a single release.
• Opportunity to work on the worldwide indie hit Potion Craft and other games that millions of players will play.
• You will see how influencers (such as Kuplinov or Markiplier) play in the game and features that you made.
• Work with people from different departments (GD, art, development, sound design, QA, etc.). You will always know who to contact for a particular task, and you will have contact with different team members.
• Loyal and creative community of the game that makes inspiring fanart, challenges, mods, tools, let’s plays, streams, guides, wiki, and many other things.
• Flexible schedule – we work in different time zones and everyone can choose more convenient days for work and rest. The main thing is to have enough common working hours with other team members with whom close work is going on (for calls, clarifications on tasks, etc.).
• Flexible vacations and absences without bureaucracy.
• A convenient, not overloaded set of tools and services for teamwork: Slack, Trello, Nuclino, Dropbox, Google Docs, Miro.
• Participation in the development of niceplay games and career growth within the company with the possibility of development in various