Lead Game Designer

Steer Studios (formerly known as Savvy Games Studios) mission is to create a world-leading game studios in Saudi Arabia, creating high-quality games for international audiences. Also to help Saudi’s passionate gaming sector to develop homegrown IP and more broadly, make KSA a global hub for gaming.

As part of the Steer studios team, you will work alongside the best global gaming talents who have relocated to Riyadh to be part of the ambitious group, and innovative, passionate and hardworking Saudis.

Steer Studios is seeking a Lead Game Designer with a passion for various genres of games and a drive for storytelling. You will act in a project leadership capacity to help solve production or creative problems. You will be working closely with the Creative/Game Director. You will be responsible for building design teams and collaborating with partners. The major focus areas of this position will be people management, creativity, communication, problem solving and mitigation.

Key Responsibilities:

• Stay up to date with the latest player trends and incorporate these where applicable.
• Plan, detail, and directly supervise the work of Game Designers in your team
• Ensure the team is creating innovative gameplay and experiences for the defined game vision to set the game's foundation.
• Conceptualize and develop characters, rules, settings, and stories for new games.
• Independently manage various creative ideation steps from pitching ideas to rapid prototyping.
• Define GDD for various game systems and document all details, iterations, and changes for the development teams.
• Review game features to ensure they are fun and developed per the GDD defined.
• Regularly playing the game updates to provide feedback and doing quality control.
• Master continues review and iteration process to incorporate user feedback in game design and feature set.
• Collaborating closely and ensuring alignment with artists, developers, and other team members.
• Capacity to train, coach, and develop junior game designers. Promote experience sharing.
• Advocate game-developer mindset in the team beyond mastery of game design and technical subjects
• Communicate and report to the Design Director.
• Help production understand the design team’s production capacity and work together to schedule and prioritize tasks

Qualifications and Key Skills:

• Expertise in Mobile and F2P with multiple titles shipped.
• 6+ years of experience as a game designer.
• Understanding of the industry, market, and target audiences.
• Strong understanding of KPIs and ability to drive game design around KPIs.
• Experience in prototyping and shipping games with Unity or Unreal gaming engines and well versed with the constraints.
• Extensive knowledge of Game Design principles and the gaming landscape.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to write clear documentation, making complex ideas clear, concise, and compelling.  Ability to give positive and constructive feedback. ​​(Briefings, review, discussions, problem-solving, etc.)
• Attention to detail from both technical and artistic perspectives.
• Command on excel or any scripting language to maintain game design configurations.
• Strong proactive problem-solving and intuitive development skills. 
• A leader who encourages team collaboration. 
• Passionate gamer with an eye for details.
• Fast and willing learner.
• Bachelor’s degree or College diploma in game design or equivalent is preferred.

Together, lets bring Steer Studios to the world!