Combat Designer / 3C's Game Designer

About the Role

As a Combat / 3C's Game Designer at Torn Banner, you will be responsible for the core combat and moment-to-moment gameplay of our project(s). You will oversee features throughout all stages of development - design, prototyping, implementation, and balancing. You will be working directly with all departments of the team to execute the game's design and be responsible for writing and maintaining GDDs. You will play a significant and driving role in the companies game design efforts with direct ownership over features and working closely with the studio's leadership in executing our projects.

In your design work, you will be focusing on bringing together artistic creativity, style, and game feel, with scientific and technical substance, in order to forge engaging and robust game features for a modern multiplayer action game. This role will have opportunity to innovate on existing mechanics and introduce new gameplay experiences, contributing to the progression of our studio's intense combat-centered gameplay.

Responsibilities:

• Design, prototype, and implement first-person and third-person melee combat combat mechanics that align with the vision for our games, including ownership over the 3 C's: character, controls, and camera.
• Collaborate with animation, programming, and level design teams to ensure combat mechanics are smoothly integrated and deliver a polished player experience.
• Guide and collaborate with the tools team to enhance the flow of development, ensuring efficient and flexible processes for iteration and testing.
• Analyze combat data, player feedback, and internal playtests to refine and iterate on combat features.
• Provide accurate risk assessments to production, code and design when new features are proposed.
• Lead playtests and playtest reviews together with the team.
• Collaborate with production on Sprint and Milestone planning.

Requirements

• At least 3 years of experience as a combat designer or 3C game designer in the video game industry
• At least 1 shipped title.
• Expertise in melee combat design and experience working on action-combat or character-action games, ideally in a FPS multiplayer environments.
• Expertise in player feedback loops, hit detection, and animation timing to create responsive and satisfying combat interactions.
• Experience with live service games, ability to analyze gameplay data and player feedback to inform design decisions and balance combat features.
• Strong communication, documentation, and presentation skills
• A high degree of self-motivation and initiative-taking, often working independently.
• Solid knowledge of game production pipelines and tools
• Skills in visual scripting and prototyping tools, such as Unreal Engine Blueprints

Bonus

• Shipped titles on both PC and console platforms
• Technical familiarity with programming and scripting language.
• Experience working with Unreal Engine 4 or higher and UE's blueprint system
• An avid multiplayer PVP player, First Person and/or Third Person titles.
• Product owner experience.