Design Director

Job Description

The Multiplayer Group (MPG) are 300 developers and data scientists, helping our clients and partners build 20+ AAA projects at any one time. We’re probably the most experienced multiplayer dev group in the world and we’re set up to help the games industry make games more easily, to deliver the highest quality, and become long-term partners.
We hire the best people, our talented team is spread across the globe. We’re remote-friendly and big on wellbeing, so if you love the sound of us, we’d love to hear from you!
Your mission:
We are actively recruiting a Design Director to help MPG deliver expert design support and solutions to our co-development partners, as well as supporting in the management of our design team.
Reporting to our Creative Director and working closely together in establishing a game’s design direction, you’ll then steward the vision through the development stages, in-depth documentation and ongoing communication - acting as an interface between all of our development teams. You will also be supporting development and testing new features and tools before they are deployed to the rest of the team and work alongside Production and our Leads in scheduling sprints and/or entire projects.
You will foster good working practices and a positive working environment within your team. You will directly or assist in line-managing our design team, ensuring they are best capable of fulfilling their commitments and are suitably informed through regular interaction and excellent documentation.
Please note this is a fully remote position in the UK.

What you’ll be doing:

• Provide creative direction and vision for game concepts, mechanics and features
• Keep up to date with industry trends, emerging technologies and player preferences to innovate gameplay mechanics and features
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including artists and programmers to integrate gameplay elements seamlessly
• Mentor and inspire our design team, fostering a culture of creativity, collaboration and continuous improvement
• Drive innovation in gameplay design, explore new ideas and experiment with new game mechanics to create a unique player experience
• Support and manage multiple projects, ensuring resources, deadlines and milestones are met and on track by working closely with our producers and project managers to develop project plans and schedules for game design tasks
• Allocate tasks and follow the evolution of the team’s progress on game design deliverables
• Actively participate and act as a regular liaison in the decision-making process with our management team and oversee the necessary adjustments to ensure that our design team meet expectations
• Work closely with our QA team to identify and address gameplay issues
• Carry out performance reviews
• Participate in future recruitment for our design team
• Foster effective communication and collaboration between design, art, engineering and other teams
• Working closely with our co-development partners and continue to foster a healthy line of communication

What we need from you:

• Solid design development experience: the roles of a design team, how a design team operates and integrates within the wider team(s)
• Extensive experience within game design in one or more design crafts as an Individual Contributor
• Proven experience as a Lead Game Designer or Game Design Director on successful, commercially released games
• Demonstrated ability to understand business and product needs and ability to decipher, interoperate and adhere to existing IP styles
• Experience in mentoring, line-managing and growing a design team - a seasoned manager, experienced with innovative and talented design teams, leading, inspiring and communicating not just with the design team, but across the entire project
• Solid problem solving: a knowledge of workflows, dependencies and typical challenges
• Great ability to empathise with other development teams and see where compromise needs to be met, or resisted
• General knowledge of typical design tools and game engines (Unreal, Unity)
• Ability to create and present high level documentation, designs etc.
• Ability to prioritise workload and distribute tasks to the team
• Experience of line-managing and developing designers
• Excellent communication skills

What would help:

• Previous experience in a similar role is highly desirable
• Experience working on several projects concurrently
• Experience of direction communication with clients
• Experience with outsource partners