Narrative Designer

Founders School is a high school where teenagers build real, profitable companies. Not every student can afford to attend, and countless people outside that age range want to learn these skills. So we're building the first entrepreneurship simulation game, built with the IP of a business educator whose books have sold millions of copies. We expect it to be played by hundreds of thousands of people, not just teenagers, within three years, and to become the canonical artifact of how to teach hard skills through play. We use AI across the full game development pipeline. Prototypes go from idea to playable in days, built by our director working with AI coding agents. We want a narrative designer who sees that as leverage: someone excited by what a small, AI-native team can make, and who sets the quality bar for every word that ships. If you think AI is overhyped or a threat to your craft, this role is not for you. We need the person who gives our games their voice, and writes the rules everyone else writes by. The Role This is our founding narrative role. You'll shape the voice of games that teach a generation how money and the real world work, with creative influence over how our games sound and feel. Our games are built for young learners, mostly teenagers. Engaging writing is crucial to everything we make: it's what makes a player care and keep playing. We're experimenting broadly with how story, writing and narrative can engage young learners, and you'll be the pioneer in this effort. You'll write the stories, characters and in-game text players meet. And you'll establish the guidelines and frameworks for how we write engaging content, from a learning point of view and an immersive one. You report to our Simulation Game Director, and work alongside a small startup-like team of senior game developers across design, art and engineering. What you will be doing Own the voice of our games, from prototype to playtesting and production. Write across every surface: dialogue, narrative arc, tutorials, UI, item text and tooltips. Set the bar for how much narrative our games include, and when to tone it up or down. Define guidelines and frameworks for writing and stories that teach real-world concepts naturally and immersively in our games. Create immersive worlds, characters, and language that makes our games compelling and hook players emotionally into intrinsic learning. Playtest and iterate your approach in response to real feedback from thousands of Alpha students and beyond, focusing on outcomes. Build or participate in building tools and workflows for writing and editing that you can employ to scale yourself or your team across multiple initiatives. Opportunities to collaborate with the team on initiatives related to marketing, branding, and growth of Founders School. What you will NOT be doing Writing a story-first game. Writing serves our goal: students learning and achieving extraordinary outcomes. Sometimes less narrative is the answer. Writing lesson plans. Your frameworks are about how concepts land through play, not what goes in the lesson. Waiting for a perfect brief. The game changes week to week. You'll get a playable build and a direction, and you'll decide what the player needs to read, and what they don't. Polishing one perfect scene a month. We iterate fast: lots of drafts, in the build, in front of players. What this becomes At 3 months: your writing is live in all of our prototypes, elevating quality perceptibly. You publish high-level guidelines and frameworks for game writing. We are getting good feedback from playtesters, and the writing is improving outcomes. At 6 months: First game is live with production-grade writing at the level of an excellent indie/AA game. You/we built tools that allow us to do the work of a small team of writers across our initiatives. We have detailed, tested frameworks for writing learning games. At 12 months: you've set the voice for more than one game on the platform. Your frameworks are how every new game gets written, and you lead a small team of writers and contractors. The path from here is Head of Narrative for every game on the platform and potentially beyond. Candidate requirements You've been the lead or sole writer on at least one shipped game, and you can show writing for systems, not just cutscenes and branching dialogue: short contextual lines, events, item text, UI, tooltips. You've written a style guide, voice guide or writing standards that other people actually wrote to, and you can show it, along with what changed because of it. You can write for teenagers. You think in systems: states, triggers, variables. You give and take blunt edits. You use AI daily across your work, whether in writing or other pursuits, and you have a point of view on where it helps a writer and where it doesn't. You're based in or able to relocate to NYC for a hybrid schedule and you're authorized to work in the US. Nice to have You've shipped a life sim, colony sim, management or tycoon game. (The Sims, RimWorld, Two Point Hospital and the like.) You've written for educational games or products. You're comfortable in a narrative tool (Ink, Yarn Spinner, articy:draft), working directly in data files, and making changes in the build yourself or with an AI coding agent. You've designed how a game teaches: onboarding, tutorials or learning content. You know your way around money and business, e.g. entrepreneurship experience, business training, or other. What this is not A typical game studio job. We are a very lean team operating like an indie studio or a startup. A cushy job. You are joining at zero. The expectations are extreme. The upside is becoming the named writer of the defining entrepreneurship simulation game of this generation. Compensation $200,000 base. Cash compensation (no equity) + relocation covered. That's well above market for narrative design, on purpose: we want someone who treats this as the most important writing of their career, not a side project or a stepping stone. As you hit the early milestones, there's room for this salary to increase. The role is hybrid in NYC. #J-18808-Ljbffr