Game Director

Game Director Position At ARRISE

ARRISE sets the benchmark for service delivery and excellence in the iGaming industry. Playing a key role in the success of its clients, ARRISE helps to deliver exceptional gaming experiences to millions of players worldwide. Maintaining that momentum and continuing to deliver an exceptional player experience means that we've had to keep growing the team. Headquartered in Gibraltar, our global team is now 10,000+ strong and spans offices in Canada, India, the Isle of Man, Latvia, Malta, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, and the UAE.

Role Overview

Our award-winning team of game creators are looking to grow so that we can release even more transformative experiences to the millions of players that enjoy our games every day. Experienced industry veterans will understand that producing blockbuster titles is no easy feat, requiring an obsessive eye for every detail including the game design, mathematics, and artwork. That's where you would come in: we're looking for a superstar game director who can work with our team to take game concepts, breathe life into them, and help turn them into hits. If you're able to expertly communicate your vision, guide game production from start to finish, inspire top design, production and development personnel, and work tireless to build games in service of entertaining our players, you'll fit right in.

Role Responsibilities

Core Responsibilities

• Work closely with the game production team to help define, conceptualize and iterate new game visions. This will include participating in design reviews, team meetings, and brainstorming sessions.
• Lead new games from start to finish. This will be particularly heavy on the conceptual development at the beginning and requires a full blueprint for the game theme, narrative, animations, sequencing, structuring, and production.
• Present concepts clearly, concisely, and effectively to the team and to stakeholders.
• Execute upon concepts and established visions for games. This means working with the game art director (and game art team) to define the creative vision and ensure that media assets are delivered, game producer and development team to ensure they understand the sequencing and flow of the game (down to the fine details of each animation) and what to build, sound designers for scoring and sound effects, and anyone else who may be part of the overall game development process that contributes to delivering a polished hit.
• Prepare tidy, thoughtful, and well-structured specifications for games and supervise their implementation to ensure they are delivered according to the original vision.
• Provide quality control over design outputs and production.
• Assist the teams with questions about the game direction and to help guide the specifications.
• Adjust designs based on feedback from stakeholders or from broader technical challenges, constraints, or limitations that may arise during the production process.
• Feedback on other proposed designs and requirements within the team, particularly in cases where it may affect the dependencies and connected interaction design.
• You will be playtesting your games like crazy: prepare to mark your own homework and ensure that all the details in your direction have been (a) implemented according to your vision and (b) play as well as you thought they would. You need to make sure that all the visuals, graphics, animations, micro-animations, flow, music, and SFX click together in a way that will resonate with the player.

Strategic Responsibilities

• Define and evolve our game direction to weave consistence and game familiarity throughout our universe of titles (where you are involved) while still giving us enough flexibility to try new things.
• Discover how to incorporate elements of our branding into games or how our game direction style can become an intrinsic element of our corporate branding strategy.
• Thoughtfully consider how games fit into the broader design language of the business and how an individual game's direction may extend to sequels or series, particularly premier titles.
• Develop creative concepts that meet the business objectives of the organization and that advance our brand and proposition strategy.
• Understand what our competitors are doing differently and to help us identify elements that we may want to incorporate.
• Work to streamline our game production pipeline to reliably deliver high-quality, fully polished games at pace.
• Evaluate technologies that can help augment our game direction pipelines.
• Keep an eye on broader design trends and tools, especially within the gaming and entertainment spaces, to ensure that we are keeping up with best design practices and exceeding customer expectations.
• Provide thoughtful, considered feedback on the overall roadmap and design strategy.

Role Requirements

Education, Qualifications, and Background

• You must have worked in a game direction capacity for designing real money gaming slots. The more projects you can demonstrate, the better.
• You must have led game projects that have shipped outstanding products for one or more major AAA land-based or digital slot manufacturers. Be prepared to discuss your roles in those projects and how you set the vision and shaped the final product.

Key Experience Areas

• You must have a clear understanding and respect for our players, ideally knowing what they like, what they're looking for, and how to give them more of the things they love. This should come from experience having developed a substantial body of work.
• You need to polish every detail by weaving static artwork, animations & micro-animations, and music & sfx in a way that is compelling and immersive for the player.
• You must be able to direct hands-on. Although this is a leadership role that will be working with orchestrating different teams, you will also need to produce clear specifications and guidelines directly illustrate your vision and expected execution for products. Be prepared to storyboard like a pro to communicate your vision.
• You must be extremely comfortable working with game designers and mathematicians to visually develop conceptual mechanics and present them to players in a way that's simple and easy to grasp. You must also understand mechanics and mathematics well enough to be able to find creative ways of display symbols, animations, and other complex concepts in a way that's fun and intuitive to players.
• You must be able to work with a wide variety of art styles, even if they are not your personal design style or preference. This is particularly important when working with valuable existing intellectual property that needs to stay true to the original.
• You must understand technical constraints and creatively work around them when necessary. Although our approach is to design the dream and figure out how to deliver it, there may be practical considerations that you should intrinsically understand.
• Having the ability to delve into graphic design, motion graphics, animation, or video outside of product and UI design is a plus.
• Ideally you will have some technical background or knowledge. Understanding how developers build the interfaces and the challenges they face is tremendously valuable when designing games.

If you're ready to set the vision, challenge the status quo, and create games that players genuinely remember, we want to meet you.