We’re recruiting for a new Technical Game Designer. If you fancy applying, check out these tips from Bob Jones, one of our Senior Designers to find out exactly what we’re looking for…

The Chat: First and foremost Hutch loves a designer who can integrate and communicate well with the team. From holding their own in technical conversations with engineers, or guiding the rollercoaster of emotions from those creative flowery types in art. A designer needs to be able to explain what they’re trying to achieve clearly, at varying levels of complexity, whilst also having enough technical ability to perform their part of the task.

The Technical Bit: At Hutch our technical designers haven’t always been super super technical! All of our games use Unity and designers have tended to be very happy getting their hands dirty in the editor but don’t need to be at John Carmack levels of coding. This can be different at some bigger companies, but with relatively small team sizes and usually only a designer or two on a project, the majority of the tech side of technical is left to engineers, leaving the designer to take on a range of other responsibilities. These include tweaking physics variables so the car slides gloriously around a corner, upgrading balancing to ensure the progression and monetisation can function properly, and track building to guarantee a fun but accessible experience for all our players.

The Multi-Faceted Bit: We’re looking for someone who’s just as happy tweaking balancing data in google sheets as writing a feature design for Super Nitrous mode, Hutch designers tend to flit around a project like a honey bee hunting that sweet sweet pollen / fun. The aim is always to produce a game that keeps players coming back for more. By providing a sense of achievement through skill, strategy or progression mechanics, we try to create game experiences that players can really get their teeth into for many months, and hopefully years.

The Cars Bit: With racing and automobiles as our genre of choice, a knowledge of cars is always a bonus, although not a prerequisite (I refer to them as the shiny one and the less shiny one a lot of the time). Also experience working on racing titles previously is a huge boon, but experience tweaking physics, building maps and balancing in other genres is great too.

The Knowledge: And with mobile being our platform, and f2p our model, a bit of knowledge of current and past games on the app store is always handy too. How have they’ve performed? What current feature design is making waves and what fads are fading away? There’s plenty of room for discussion within the team and all voices and opinions are welcomed!

In summary, if you like digging around in a game editor, enjoy creating, testing and iterating on gameplay, are happy balancing variables in spreadsheets, have an open ear for feedback, and enough knowledge to hold opinions on the game as a whole, then you’re right for the role! JOIN US! You can find more details on our Careers page.