Lead Game Designer

Who We Are OtherSide Entertainment is an independent game studio with offices in Concord, MA, and remote staff throughout North America. Our mission is to create deeply immersive games that draw players into richly imagined worlds; games that empower players to choose their own play-style, making their experience unique and personal; games that encourage players to team up with their friends and weave their own shared narrative; the kind of games that are powered by our players’ vision as much as our own. Together, we aim to evolve the “player-authored” tradition of Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Thief, and Deus Ex – all games developed by the company’s founders, Paul Neurath and Warren Spector. The Opportunity Hey! You! Want to work with Warren Spector on his latest project? Do you love immersive sims? Do you get excited about games where player choice actually matters, where exploration is meaningful, and where the world reacts to what players do? Awesome, because that’s what we are building! We’re continuing development on a next-generation immersive sim with gameplay focused around non-lethal exploration, meaningful choices, and giving players the ability to shape the world around them in significant ways. If you are a Lead Game Designer who wants to stretch your design muscles, help build a brand new game in a beautiful world, and work alongside one of the creators of the immersive sim genre, this one might tickle your fancy! This is a pretty unique opportunity to play a key role in building and launching a major new PC and console game, while helping push the immersive sim genre forward. This role reports directly to Warren and will work closely with our Game Director, Lead Producer, discipline leads, and the rest of the leadership team. You’ll also get the opportunity to work with me, Andrew Alcott, as your recruiter and the one who wrote this whole dang thing! People have said nice things, hopefully you will too! What You’ll Do Working closely with Warren, our Game Director, Lead Producer, and other discipline leads, you’ll lead a team of designers across a variety of multidisciplinary areas. You’ll be working closely with a lot of talented and design opinionated folks here, so we need someone who can stand up to big ideas and be comfortable pushing back when necessary. This is a leadership-forward role. You will not just be “the person with good design ideas,” though those are certainly welcome. You’ll be helping take ideas from Warren, your team, and other stakeholders, connect the dots between them, sometimes get into some passionate discussions, and ultimately combine them into what will hopefully be the next big thing™ in Immersive Sims! It’s Art! It’s Science! It’s a bit chaotic, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. As a Lead Game Designer, you’ll wear a lot of hats. Some will be fancy leadership hats. Some will be “please help everyone get aligned before this turns into a meeting hydra” hats. The big ones are: Own the GDD and roadmap, and keep both useful. Not just “technically exists in Confluence somewhere” useful, but accurate, organized, current, and actually helpful for the team. You’ll manage design ownership, keep documentation and roadmap planning aligned with where the game is really going, and help balance prototyping, R&D, feature/content development, and optimization so we’re making the right cool stuff at the right time. You’ll also prepare milestone materials like presentations, overviews, videos, and summaries that clearly tell the story of what we’re building and why people should be excited. Be brave. If you know immersive sims, you know Warren. Sometimes folks can think of someone that’s been making games for 40+ years as a mythological being. He is not (and will tell you that). He is the shower-thoughts kind of guy, throwing whimsical ideas at the wall to see what sticks. You’ll have to be that wall. Like any good wall, you have to be sturdy, and not afraid to push back when needed. Unlike a wall, we don’t want you to be inflexible and shoot down every idea, that makes a game by checkboxes and that’s no fun. Keep the design signal clear. You’ll communicate up, down, and sideways so people understand design goals, decisions, tradeoffs. Ensure alignment towards execution around Warren’s established vision. Lead and support a team of experienced designers. This includes mentoring, coaching, career development, workload management, and generally helping great designers do great work without burning themselves into sad crispy devs. Champion design quality through honest, collaborative feedback. You’ll help create a review culture that is candid, critical, useful, and kind. We value candor and empathy here, because “this needs work” and “you are a valu