Who We Are

OtherSide Entertainment is an independent game studio with offices in Concord, MA, and remote staff throughout North America. Our mission is to create deeply immersive games that draw players into richly imagined worlds; games that empower players to choose their own play-style, making their experience unique and personal; games that encourage players to team up with their friends and weave their own shared narrative; the kind of games that are powered by our players’ vision as much as our own. Together, we aim to evolve the “player-authored” tradition of Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Thief, and Deus Ex – all games developed by the company’s founders, Paul Neurath and Warren Spector.

The Opportunity

Hey! You! Want to work with Warren Spector on his latest project?

Do you love immersive sims? Do you get excited about games where player choice actually matters, where exploration is meaningful, and where the world reacts to what players do?

Awesome, because that’s what we are building!

We’re continuing development on a next-generation immersive sim with gameplay focused around non-lethal exploration, meaningful choices, and giving players the ability to shape the world around them in significant ways.

If you are a Lead Game Designer who wants to stretch your design muscles, help build a brand new game in a beautiful world, and work alongside one of the creators of the immersive sim genre, this one might tickle your fancy! This is a pretty unique opportunity to play a key role in building and launching a major new PC and console game, while helping push the immersive sim genre forward.

This role reports directly to Warren and will work closely with our Game Director, Lead Producer, discipline leads, and the rest of the leadership team. You’ll also get the opportunity to work with me, Andrew Alcott, as your recruiter and the one who wrote this whole dang thing! People have said nice things, hopefully you will too!

What You’ll Do

Working closely with Warren, our Game Director, Lead Producer, and other discipline leads, you’ll lead a team of designers across a variety of multidisciplinary areas. You’ll be working closely with a lot of talented and design opinionated folks here, so we need someone who can stand up to big ideas and be comfortable pushing back when necessary.

This is a leadership-forward role. You will not just be “the person with good design ideas,” though those are certainly welcome. You’ll be helping take ideas from Warren, your team, and other stakeholders, connect the dots between them, sometimes get into some passionate discussions, and ultimately combine them into what will hopefully be the next big thing™ in Immersive Sims! It’s Art! It’s Science! It’s a bit chaotic, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

As a Lead Game Designer, you’ll wear a lot of hats. Some will be fancy leadership hats. Some will be “please help everyone get aligned before this turns into a meeting hydra” hats. The big ones are:

• Own the GDD and roadmap, and keep both useful. Not just “technically exists in Confluence somewhere” useful, but accurate, organized, current, and actually helpful for the team. You’ll manage design ownership, keep documentation and roadmap planning aligned with where the game is really going, and help balance prototyping, R&D, feature/content development, and optimization so we’re making the right cool stuff at the right time. You’ll also prepare milestone materials like presentations, overviews, videos, and summaries that clearly tell the story of what we’re building and why people should be excited.

• Be brave. If you know immersive sims, you know Warren. Sometimes folks can think of someone that’s been making games for 40+ years as a mythological being. He is not (and will tell you that). He is the shower-thoughts kind of guy, throwing whimsical ideas at the wall to see what sticks. You’ll have to be that wall. Like any good wall, you have to be sturdy, and not afraid to push back when needed. Unlike a wall, we don’t want you to be inflexible and shoot down every idea, that makes a game by checkboxes and that’s no fun.

• Keep the design signal clear. You’ll communicate up, down, and sideways so people understand design goals, decisions, tradeoffs. Ensure alignment towards execution around Warren’s established vision.

• Lead and support a team of experienced designers. This includes mentoring, coaching, career development, workload management, and generally helping great designers do great work without burning themselves into sad crispy devs.

• Champion design quality through honest, collaborative feedback. You’ll help create a review culture that is candid, critical, useful, and kind. We value candor and empathy here, because “this needs work” and “you are a valued human” should live in the same sentence.

• Spot risks before they become giant flaming design goblins. You’ll work with the rest of the leadership team to identify design needs, staffing gaps, process issues, and other places where wheels might get wobbly.

• Help designs survive contact with reality. You’ll work with other disciplines to validate designs, pressure test ideas, and make sure what sounds great in a conversation still works once art, engineering, production, audio, narrative, and the rest of the team get involved. The engineers especially have a lot of thoughts, and we should make sure those thoughts are heard. Happy engineers help make a happy studio.

• Jump into prototypes and testing when needed. You’ll help prove out design concepts, tune and balance features, and make sure we are learning from the work instead of just lovingly staring at it and hoping it becomes fun. You’ll do a lot of staring though, our art is great!

• Represent the game internally and externally. You’ll be a champion for the project, the design team, and most importantly, player experience. Because at the end of the day, “the player is the whole dang point.” - Warren, probably.

What We’re Looking For

• Lead Designer and people manager experience, within the past 5 years, on a successfully released and well-regarded PC or console game, expansion, content pack, or live title release, managing multiple direct reports, design processes, and design information repositories. You definitely need to be comfortable managing people, supporting career growth, giving clear feedback, making decisions when signals are muddy, and collaborating across disciplines.

• 6+ years total game design experience, with at least two shipped titles and a team management role. You should have a strong sense of what makes gameplay great, how to build toward a high-quality bar, and how to help a team get there without turning everything into design-by-shouting-match. You’ll bring high energy, strong communication, and a healthy respect for the fact that game development is messy, creative, weird, and usually better when people actually trust each other. As stated, you’ll also have to be comfortable working with someone like Warren and being able to sometimes know the difference between a musing and a directive.

• Experience with immersive sims as a player, including the ability to clearly articulate what defines the genre and what makes it special. This one is important, we’re making an immersive sim after all. Warren will quiz you on this.

• Strong decision-making skills, especially in places where feedback is conflicting, everyone is entrenched in their idea, and there is not one obvious “correct” answer with a nice exclamation point over it.

• Hands-on Unreal Engine 5 experience at an implementation level. We’re not expecting you to be in the engine every day, but you should be able to help out your fellow designers either with words or occasionally some implementation work sometimes.

Bonus Points

Not required, but definitely nice to have:

• Experience working on games with systemic gameplay, emergent player choice, stealth, exploration, RPG systems, branching mission structures, or other deliciously complicated design spaces.

• Experience leading design teams through early development, prototyping, pre-production, or major feature definition.

Final Notes

You’ll be joining a project with a big creative swing, a genre-defining creative leader, and a team working to make something ambitious. That means we need someone who can bring structure without smothering creativity, feedback without ego, and leadership without needing to be the loudest person in the room.

If that sounds like your kind of challenge, we’d love to hear from you. And if you give a cover letter, know that I read every one with every application, so please don’t AI generate one. We make things with love here, and if you love immersive sims, you’ll write one with love as well! Cover letters are not a requirement.

The Standard Stuff

This is a full-time, remote working role, with competitive compensation and a full suite of benefits available anywhere in the United States. All team members may be asked to occasionally travel for key meetings, as part of their job responsibilities.

At OtherSide Entertainment, we know our success depends on our people. Just as our mission is oriented around empowering our players, we open our doors to all kinds of candidates. Our development process and players benefit from a variety of points of view, united by a shared passion for making fun and engaging experiences. If you don’t hit every one of our bullets, unless otherwise noted, feel free to still submit an application if you too resonate with our mission. If you require any accommodations to ensure an equitable interviewing experience please let us know!

A Warning About Job Scams - We hate that we have to say it, but there are always bad actors trying to take advantage of people. We've become aware that there are scammers impersonating us with job interview messages. Please keep diligent and know that we will never have you download anything for an interview (We use Teamtailor, which is a SaaS product) and not Telegram or other message services. We also will not ever ask you for money, for you to buy your own equipment, or that you travel somewhere for an interview and we will reimburse you. When in doubt, please feel free to message the recruiter listed for each role on LinkedIn, or our CPO Juliette (https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliettedupre/) about the legitimacy of any messages.