Combat Game Designer Senior

Responsibilities

- Own and evolve core combat systems for a third-person action game, including targeting, combat metrics, input buffering and queuing, player abilities, progression, aggro and threat management, enemy AI behaviors, combat states, and related foundational systems.

- Develop and refine the overall combat framework for a melee- and ranged-focused power-fantasy experience, ensuring that combat is responsive, readable, impactful, and consistently rewarding.

- Design, prototype, implement, balance, and ship a wide variety of enemies, elite units, and bosses, from core combat archetypes to complex multi-phase encounters.

- Tune combat at the micro level, including animation timing, hit reactions, attack windows, i-frames, damage volumes, hit detection, recovery frames, stagger, crowd-control, and other moment-to-moment parameters.

- Work closely with gameplay engineering to build and improve combat systems, identify technical constraints, and develop solutions for complex combat interactions.

- Collaborate with character art, animation, VFX, audio, and narrative teams to deliver enemies, weapons, abilities, and combat encounters with a high level of polish and strong moment-to-moment feedback.

- Help define and balance player-facing combat systems such as weapons, abilities, damage, player progression, enemy scaling, and other systems that directly affect combat power and game balance.

- Produce clear design documentation, technical specifications, and implementation guidelines to communicate combat designs and ensure alignment across disciplines.

- Mentor other combat designers and contribute to the development of combat design practices, standards, and tools across the team.

- Work with production to scope combat features and ensure designs can be delivered within available time, resources, and technical constraints.

Qualifications

- Proven experience shipping at least one commercially released action game as a Combat Designer or equivalent role.

- Strong experience designing combat for third-person action games, preferably with both melee and ranged combat.

- Hands-on experience with gameplay scripting or visual scripting, such as Unreal Engine Blueprint, and a solid understanding of how combat logic is implemented.

- Experience collaborating directly with animation teams, including defining combat animation requirements, timing, state transitions, attack windows, and, where applicable, motion-capture workflows and shot lists.

- Strong prototyping and iteration skills, with the ability to quickly turn a combat concept into something playable and evaluate it through hands-on testing.