Description
Producer
This is possibly our most important hire for 2021! Sophia is a significantly bigger project than our previous titles, demanding a large quantity of asset production, many new hires, several console ports, and constant deadlines for quarterly milestones and weekly testplays. Going forward, our current arrangement of “the game director acts as part-time producer” will no longer be enough! We need a real pro to take over, ensuring every deadline is met and the technical and creative output of our team is maximized.
Requirements:
Minimum 5 years (ideally 10+) in the industry, with several in a related role. [producer or project manager (preferably senior, lead, or higher) at a medium/large studio] or [project head, management, or company founder (at a smaller studio)].
Multiple shipped titles, ideally in the space of high-fidelity 3D PC and console games. More = better, but quality over quantity. Bonus points if you’ve worked on games-as-a-service (MMOs, battle royales, etc.), AAA first person titles, open world games, puzzle games, or anything in Unreal Engine.
Exceptional organization, collaboration, and communication skills.
Analytical decision-making skills. Our CEO will be deferring to you for planning decisions that are critical to the success of the business. You need an evidence-based approach.
Bonus points for experience managing a remote team.
Responsibilities:
Managing and supporting a team of approximately a dozen full-time engineers and creatives on a development budget in the USD $2M-$3M range.
Planning for releases and milestones, working with our engineers and game director (on Lunarch’s side) as well as our publisher’s own producer and product manager.
Planning and shipping builds for weekly testplays, with the goal of maximizing iteration frequency to gather actionable feedback for our design team.
Helping to anticipate staffing and outsourcing needs throughout the life of our products, ensuring an optimal match between available people and available work.
Collaborating with the art team and external contractors to manage asset pipelines and make sure everything ends up in the game.
Tracking the effort spent on various projects (as needed for Canadian tax credits like SR&ED and OIDMTC).
Influencing the culture of our company as we continue to grow in a remote environment, ensuring that creative output is optimized in the absence of a physical office.
Solving the productivity min/max problem: minimizing the burdens that meetings, emails, and productivity software impose on the rest of the team, while ensuring that everyone has clear objectives, gets their work done, stays in the loop, and is able to contribute ideas and feedback to the creative process.
Managing the QA process (initially on your own, but later with QA staff and/or outsourced QA partners working under you).
This is NOT a role where you’ll spend all day sitting in meetings, messing around in Jira, or writing progress reports that nobody reads. We need people who can *get shit done*. Lunarch is a small company, so roles are less specialized than at larger studios. Ideal candidates are able to add value by filling the gaps left by specializations that we’re not big enough to hire for.
Possible extra responsibilities (it’s not expected that you can do all of these, but the more you can meaningfully help with, the better):
Outsourcing management. Interviewing outsourcing partners (for art, QA, porting, localization, etc.), negotiating, and acting as a primary contact.
Hiring (especially recruiting, screening, and onboarding people). We’ll be adding 8-10 new staff in the next year, possibly more.
Grant application writing (e.g. for provincial and federal tax credits).
Managing our version control processes (Are you a Git wizard? Do you know how to configure LFS on github? Do you have a foolproof system for managing Unreal levels to avoid conflicts?)
Asset wrangling (Can you work in UE4 to merge in assets from our external partners and put them in the game? Can you configure optimal LOD, collision, or texture compression settings?)
Build engineering (Can you set up nightly Unreal Engine builds? Continuous integration?)
Porting (Have you shipped on consoles before? Do you know your way around cert requirements really well? Can you guide our devs through the process? The more we can keep in house, the better.)
Art direction (Our partner studios have their own art directors, but we still need to review their work and request revisions as needed.)
Design (Are you into puzzle design? Progression systems? MMO economies?)
User Research (Are you into analytics and/or surveys? Are you a stats expert? Good at qualitative research?)
Are you really talented at naming things?
Salary: USD 75k-120k/yr, possibly higher for top-tier candidates
Contact: careers@lunarchstudios.com
About Lunarch Studios:
Lunarch is a small (<10 people, but growing significantly in 2021) Canadian game developer founded in 2013 by a group of math olympiad champions, professional poker players, and MIT PhD students. We develop cutting-edge, intelligent games that leverage technology to create novel and deep experiences for smart players. Our products are ambitious, one-of-a-kind titles that define new genres and innovate in multiple directions at once. Their creation demands exceptional intelligence, creativity, and hard work.
We're the developers behind Prismata—a multiplayer strategy game that blends elements of RTS, deckbuilders, and board games. Our upcoming title (“Project Sophia”) is similarly innovative and aims to bring large-scale multiplayer gameplay to the 3D puzzle genre (Portal, The Witness, Zelda, etc.).
Lunarch is more like a tech startup than a traditional game studio. We're in a competitive space that rewards quickness and demands high-quality work that meets all requirements on the first try. Ideal candidates are exceptionally intelligent, knowledgeable about games, and highly productive. We love people who have excelled in competitions (math/programming contests, puzzlehunts, science fairs, infosec CTF, competitive gaming, poker, etc.), people with heroic academic accomplishments (awards, publications, etc.), or people with proven track records or killer portfolios (shipped games or jaw-dropping work in art/animation/audio/UI/design/etc.).
The benefits of Lunarch include an excellent work culture and high-tier compensation (aiming to be competitive with tech startups), but most importantly, you’ll contribute to ambitious titles that aim to make meaningful advances to the state of the art. We operate in an ideal mid-budget space: we’re sufficiently well-funded to hire the best people, do high-quality work, and promote our titles widely, but we’re not constrained by the AAA need to stick with low-risk designs for mass-market audiences. You will make an impact here.