Game Designer

The design challenge

A microgame has to be understood by 8 players in roughly one second. One verb — dodge, stack, chase, balance, catch. One spatial idea — the arena's shape already teaches you what to do. No tutorial. No narration. A player who shows up late joins Round 4 with zero briefing and should be playing competently inside the first ten seconds.

This constraint is the whole job. Inside it, the space is enormous.

What you'd be designing

Microgames

Short, punchy game designs. You're the pitch, the paper design, the playtest notes, the tuning pass. You scope, balance, and iterate each game until it holds up at repeat play.

Minigames

Longer-format sessions (3–10 minutes) that use more of the platform's capabilities. Racing, last-person-standing, cooperative heists. These are designed for repeat play over months.

Progression & unlocks

XP curves. What's earnable, what's purchasable. Unlock pacing that keeps long-time players returning without shutting out new ones. Small, frequent wins.

Session shape

A playlist of 7 microgames. How do they cluster? When does the game get weirder, when does it get harder, when does it break formula? This is the rhythm section of the whole experience.

How we work

• Design doc → paper prototype → playable rough → polish pass → ship → tune
• Every microgame has a sentence-long pitch before anything else happens
• Playtest weekly with real humans, including kids and parents and drunk adults
• If a game's fun, it stays. If it isn't, we cut it or rework it. No sunk cost
• You'll work closely with the art, audio, and engineering team — design includes how it feels, sounds, and reads

What we're looking for

• You've shipped games — ideally small ones, many of them
• You have taste and opinions about microgames. Favorite WarioWare minigame? You have one
• You can explain a design in a sentence. You can then argue for it for an hour
• Comfortable with rapid iteration — you don't get attached to ideas that aren't working
• Strong instincts for multiplayer feel: legibility, fairness, rubber-banding, catch-up
• Portfolio with playable prototypes, not just slide decks

Bonus points

• Prototype in a game engine (Unity, Godot, Three.js) without waiting for an engineer
• Experience running playtests and writing actionable notes
• A weird backlog of games nobody asked you to make