Lead Game Designer Jobs

About Sandbox VR

We’re Sandbox VR, and we’re the most advanced virtual reality experience in the world. Our mission is to connect with our guests through world-class immersive experiences. Our vision is to create a global community where people come together to experience new realities. With our Hollywood motion capture cameras, 3D body trackers, and haptic suits, we’re operating the next generation of cinemas - where our guests are the stars of their own movies. Venturing into space? You got it. Channeling your inner pirate? Absolutely. Need to get some steps but hate the gym? Our experiences definitely get our guests moving.

Since we launched in Hong Kong in 2017, we now live in 31 locations and 7 countries around the world. (We’re the #1 Activity in Hong Kong and Singapore on TripAdvisor and average 4.7/5 stars on our Google reviews across all US locations). Oh, did we mention we're rapidly expanding? We want you to be a part of our journey and help us build this new world!

About the job

Sandbox VR is constantly looking for new ways to amaze our guests and immerse them in thrilling, one-of-a-kind VR experiences. As a Lead Designer at Sandbox VR, you’ll be responsible for using your strong design background, superb creative taste, and incredible attention to detail to ensure each moment of our VR experience is of the highest quality.

This role gives you many avenues with which to express your creativity and skills. At Sandbox VR, you will have the chance to innovate, invent new VR gameplay mechanics, write compelling narratives, and build memorable worlds that our guests will talk about for days and days after their visit.

What You'll Do:

• Level Design – You will also use your background in level design to create exciting and compelling level designs for each location within our experiences. You will use tools to implement your whitebox designs into each game. You will work to thoroughly test and iterate upon your whitebox designs before they go into the art production pipeline. Finally, you’ll work with the environment art team during each step of the process and collaborate to ensure each location is visually engaging and thrilling for gameplay.
• Game Design – You’ll work closely with the Creative Director to plan out each moment of our VR Experiences and lend your design skills to solving difficult design problems. You’ll invent fun and highly intuitive gameplay mechanics which our guests can learn quickly and enjoy. You will use your expertly-tuned design sensibilities to adjust balance and pacing of each experience as needed. At the end of the day, you know what ‘good’ looks like, and you’ll strive to ensure each experience meets your own high professional standards.
• Narrative & Writing – You will use your creativity to develop interesting characters and narratives for our VR experiences. You’ll have a chance to innovate in the narrative space and develop the best ways to tell stories within VR. You will use your writing skills to create memorable and interesting dialogue which is not overly verbose or self-indulgent.

What We're Looking For:

• Communication – You are a superb communicator and understand how to keep stakeholders informed when decisions affect other departments. You are extremely clear when communicating your ideas and designs to fellow team members so that everyone understands the design intent and the tasks they need to do to achieve a great result. Finally, you are also good at pitching your ideas and are very open to constructive criticism and feedback.
• Documentation – You can create strong design documentation, including both detailed written documentation and compelling visual documentation (depending on your audience).
• Technically Proficient – You’ve used numerous proprietary and third-party tools during your career including: Unity, Unreal Editor, or equivalent. You are comfortable with visual scripting tools and ideally you can script using C#.
• You play screen-based games and VR games... A lot! – You constantly keep yourself up to date by playing some of the world’s best screen-based and VR games. As you play games, you constantly evaluate them and think about why certain design decisions were made and how tweaking these decisions could affect the user experience.
• Prototyping – You work well with programmers and artists in order to create strong prototypes that prove design ideas so that features can enter production with confidence.
• Versatile Design Background – You have multiple shipped titles which you were a Senior or Lead Designer on, including at least one VR title which is either a high-quality indie VR game or a AAA VR game. You have at least 5+ years of experience in designing games. During your career your responsibilities should have included a variety of level design, game design, mission design, and writing responsibilities.
• Analytical Skills – You have a strong understanding of how to interpret player data and make informed design decisions about how to improve projects post-release. You have experience balancing games.
• Combat Design Experience – You have been the primary combat designer for at least one title in your experience.