Combat Designer

November 12, 2024

Job Description

We’re looking for a highly-skilled, deeply collaborative Combat Designer who can create deep and engaging gameplay for our game. You will work side-by-side with the Game Director and design team to conceive of and build gameplay that can delight players for thousands of hours. You’ve been a lifelong student of what makes core combat tick in every game you’ve played, and you’ve turned those experiences into a deep thought process around PVP combat.

You’re able to move seamlessly and rapidly from idea to prototype to tuning, creating everything from innovative weapons and abilities, engaging enemies and other broad combat systems. You’re experienced working in tight iteration loops that incorporate and build on player feedback. You’re collaborative and productive working in a very cross-discipline environment.

Ideally, you have:

  • 5+ years of experience in games.
  • Hands-on experience with and strong ability to implement in Unreal.
  • A track record of designing and implementing deep and engaging combat.

We are a small team with big ambitions. We are hungry and want to win. We want to stay small, move fast, and ship early (while we’re still embarrassed). Whenever possible we opt to buy vs. build and we view game development as our craft – not our specialized sub-disciplines. We’re looking for people who thrive with a lot of freedom and responsibility; who wear a lot of different hats comfortably; and who are always, always acting on behalf of the player.

A key aspect of our compensation philosophy is that value creation should be aligned with rewards. Right now this means that equity is a significant portion of every full-time employee’s compensation and in the future we will look at tools like performance based bonuses and profit sharing. What will always be true is that if we win, we win together. Theorycraft offers competitive base salaries and generous equity packages for full-time employees. As a pre-revenue startup, our base salary range for all roles, including this one, is $80k-$225k. Final base salary will be determined by an array of factors including internal equity, job related knowledge, skills, and work experience. In addition to a competitive base salary and equity, employees at Theorycraft will receive all of our other great benefits and perks, including unlimited, open PTO, health, vision, dental insurance for you and your family, and an annual game budget.

We believe that people on our team should live their best lives while doing their best work (and that these should complement each other!). Therefore we’ve committed to distributed work (within 3 timezones of PST), with regular, in-person meetups to stay connected as a team. We support families and all of the unpredictability children can bring (especially when working from home). We offer unlimited, open PTO, competitive base salary, health, vision, dental insurance for you and your family, an annual game budget, and, of course, equity as a way to ensure that we all succeed together.