Design

Senior/Principal Combat Designer - Permanent

OVERVIEW

At PlayStation London Studio, we are on a mission to make award-winning, landmark games. Our upcoming PlayStation 5 online multiplayer game will be focused on a brand-new IP we are extraordinarily excited about.

Our new game is close to our hearts, as the whole team collaborated on coming up with the concept from the very beginning. We’ve seen this idea grow from a seed, and now we’re looking for new starters to continue our journey on shaping our plans for this AAA project.

We’re also a part of the PlayStation Studios family, a collective of teams - from Insomniac to Naughty Dog and many more. As such, we have solid support system – often knowledge sharing industry advancements so that all our studios, individually lead the way to create memorable gaming experiences.

About the Role

As a Senior/Principal Combat Designer, you will become the guiding light for our Gameplay team in the design and development of our melee combat mechanics for this action/adventure title. You'll collaborate with the rest of our design team to build combat into highly re-playable coop missions!

Our Gameplay Designers are hugely important to our journey, as they work closely with the team to craft and balance the mechanics, delivering outstanding gameplay which keeps players coming back for more! As part of a Sony first-party studio, your work will be played by millions of players across the world.

Our Combat Designer will have excellent instincts for what constitutes highly engaging combat. You'll be experienced in designing systems that can handle numerous enemies, co-op combinations, and combat scenarios. You are a clear communicator, able to take input from other teams to develop systems and continually improve as well as balance gameplay.

Scope of Work

• Critical contribution to the design of a well-balanced roster of Heroes, each with signature abilities.
• Ensuring our enemies have clear attack patterns which players can learn to combat with a Heroes' set of abilities.
• Collaborating with Gameplay and Live Ops Designers to build an engaging and scalable skills and progression system that retains players.
• Continuously balance the combat gameplay for the best possible feel.
• Deliver inspiring design briefs to kick off strike teams who you can work with to rapidly prototype and productionize features.
• Lead multi-discipline teams to unify and deliver on the combat direction.
• Be able to clearly communicate the tooling and system requirements you need from our technical teams.
• Partner with Engineers and Technical Designers to build and configure gameplay mechanics.

About you

• Passionate about crafting satisfying combat that combines both skill and strategy.
• A player-centric developer – you're always thinking about the player's experience.
• Happy to learn new tools and develop collaborative, adaptable workflows,
• Excited to show off your work early on and embrace feedback from all teams.
• Eager to seek new ways to improve processes.
• Authentic, honest, and comfortable challenging the status quo.

Experience / Knowledge

• Experience crafting, owning, and delivering large scale combat features, preferably on PC and Console, from concept to in the hands of players.
• Experience working on a multiplayer combat title and can design for great interactions between players.
• Experience working on a GaaS (game as a service); familiar with principles and processes related to working on an evolving product.
• Scripting experience (e.g. visual scripting, Lua, or python), ideally in C#.
• Blueprints & behaviour tree scripting to develop and tune gameplay systems.
• Comfortable presenting and communicating design to multi-discipline teams.
• Shown design documentation skills.

Pluses

• Prior experience designing Spell Casting and Melee combat mechanics.
• Experience working on the continuous balancing needs of a live game
• Experience with game engines and tools, such as, Unity or Unreal.

Impact & Complexity

We are looking for Combat Designers working at a Senior or Principal level. You will build and explore large, interconnected gameplay mechanics and would be encouraged to set an excellent standard of work and offer support to less experienced Designers.

If you are at a Principal level, you will have several years' experience developing AAA console/PC titles, through all stages of development cycle at a Senior level. Therefore, you will bring expert level knowledge to the team and will have more responsibility.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

We encourage you to bring your best-unaltered self to work. Inclusivity is one of our studio values, which means we embrace different perspectives to fuel our creativity and we know that our games are stronger for it!

It is important to us that our teams are passionate about diversity and inclusion. They must understand that these words speak to people’s lived experiences that may differ to their own. We encourage our teams to educate themselves and show support and their commitment to DE&I (diversity, equity, and inclusion). As an example, some of our outreach activities include giving talks, mentoring, speaking at schools, running roundtables and much more.

We therefore welcome applications from all groups who are underrepresented in the games industry. We can offer training to upskill our team, so if you don’t feel you meet 100% of the job criteria, we still strongly encourage you to apply and look forward to hearing from you.

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Our roles can be flexible in terms of work location in the UK. We will consider the individual’s preference for hybrid, remote or onsite working. We may be able to support remote working from a selection of other countries depending on location and the role you're applying to, so please reach out to see if that could be a possibility. If you wish to relocate to the UK and require sponsorship, we can support you with the visa process.

We have so many benefits, and we felt that if we listed them all out here it might look like we are bragging! What we can say is that we have you covered, from health and wellbeing, to finance and personal development, there is something there for everyone! If you would like to know more head to our benefits and perks page!