You love programming useful web applications to enhance the gamer’s experience, and finding ways to get the most performance out of databases. Your work extends the game into the real world, and lets gamers interact with the game remotely from any web enabled device. You enjoy building communities online, and finding ways to make game data interesting and useful. You also deeply enjoy the challenge of scaling web and database functionality to handle millions of gamers, using smart programming, exploring the latest open source tools and languages, and a critical eye for performance.

A Typical Day

You and your team attend a kick-off milestone meeting where you are charged with designing and implementing the best character viewer for the game that you can think of. You break out into a planning session with your web designer and community manager and quickly sketch out a few ideas. Using rapid development and prototyping, you get a skeleton of the web application up and running and deploy it to the rest of the company for feedback. After several rapid cycles of deploying, testing and iteration, the web designer puts the final touches on the graphics and the milestone is done.

Who You Work With the Most

You work closely with the community manager, designing and developing applications that help build great gaming communities. You also work closely with the development team, finding ways to extend the game into the world wide web and web enabled devices.

What You’ve Done Before

• Proven track record of delivering successful web applications with scalability
• Buzzword Compliant (PHP, Zend, jQuery, Javascript, HTML, XMLRPC)
• Experienced with LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
• Strong experience developing secure systems
• Strong understanding of MySQL scalability techniques (sharding, memcache, and others)
• Passion to design the best web applications and online communities
• Passion for games

Send resume and cover letter to:

Red 5 Studios Email: jobs@red5studios.com

You are a talented artist that enjoys the challenges of expressing abstract ideas through the animation and creation of visual effects. You enjoy tweaking particle generators and designing new ways to make something explode or burn or making waves crash on the shore. You have experience working with organic and mechanical effects and are able to represent a magic missile as easily as an exploding grenade.

A Typical Day

You sit down with a team of designers and animators to discuss a new ability for players; including how the ability works and brainstorming some ideas for the visual effects. After the meeting, you head back to your desk to start creating a particle system that will express the new ability. You come up with a few examples and gather feedback before adding it to the game for everyone to take a look.

Who You Work With the Most

You end up working with the designers, animators and technical artists the most. Making sure that the effects match the systems that have been designed as well as making sure the performance requirements are met.

What You’ve Done Before

• Experience creating and animating expressive visual effects utilizing Photoshop, Unreal, and 3d Studio (or equivalent programs).
• Ability to create natural and fantastical effects based on design requirements.
• Understanding of technical requirements and performance considerations for effects pipelines.
• Ability to work alone and as part of a team.
• Able to match existing art style guides.
• A passion for games.
• Previous games experience is a bonus.

Send resume and cover letter to:

Red 5 Studios Email: jobs@red5studios.com

You can’t get enough of playing and designing multiplayer, competitive shooters. You are almost always at the top of the ranks and have a deep understanding of what makes for fun and competitive gameplay. But you also are able to identify with the needs of casual gamers, recognizing the activities, hooks and helpful UI and feedback elements that will draw more players into your game.

A Typical Day

After enjoying a nice cup of coffee, you jump into a meeting with your feature team: a cross-disciplinary group of artists, designers and programmers that is responsible for weapons design. You realize that a good weapon has to function, feel, look and sound great, so you and the team brainstorm the look and feel of a new weapon you’ve been planning with the designers before dividing up the tasks. You agree to meet back in a day or two to see how things are coming along. Meanwhile, you jump into your second feature team in charge of a particular map for the game. You describe the new weapon that you’ve been planning with the other team, and you quickly sketch out a few ways that it could be useful in the new map. The whole team gets excited about the possibilities, and working together with the weapons team, sets a goal to get weapon and map into next week’s playtest.

Who You Work With the Most

You work closely with the Lead Designer and Class Lead to help set up overall goals for the gameplay and co-ordinate with the team to rally around a common vision. On your feature teams, you are often working with artists and programmers, and together directly implementing the feature your team is responsible for.

What You’ve Done Before

• Experience designing combat systems, levels or other key design elements for multiplayer online shooters.
• Excellent Communication and Organizational skills
• Passion for playing online shooters at a competitive level
• Great people skills, able to work in multi-disciplinary, team oriented environments.
• A sense of fun.

You look at massively multiplayer online games as a collection of systems and code. You love watching players encounter the new features and systems you’ve written, allowing them to interact with the world and perhaps even create new things within it. Item creation, guild systems, spells and abilities—anything the players can interact with is in your purview.

During the design process you’re all about prototyping game systems, and both before and after release you want to make sure the logic on the server that governs these systems is sound. Building upon the fundamental server architecture, you and the other gameplay programmers code the systems players will utilize over and over again.

A Typical Day

You spend your morning working with the design team going over a prototype for the spells and class abilities system. It’s important you determine what underlying technology is necessary if you’re going to make the system work. After coming up with a basic plan you meet with the server and AI engineers to make certain the technology groundwork exists to implement the feature. You outline a basic specification on the wiki and pass it around for input. While you are waiting on feedback, you hit the bug database and knock off the last remaining issues with the last system you implemented.

Who You Work With the Most

You collaborate with the other programmers before implementing any new features or procedural changes, trying to get the best idea on how to tackle any issue. You also spend a lot of time working with the design team. You’re part game designer yourself, but with your programming knowledge you’re able to ask questions and steer the game designers toward feature solutions that take advantage of your existing code and technology. When they propose a feature, you can come back with mechanical solution suggestions that make sense, both to the programmers and the designers.

What You’ve Done Before

• 4+ years C/C++ programmer
• 2+ years programming PC games
• Networked multiplayer experience
• Experience working closely with designers
• Excellent and self-driven optimizer
• Passion for games and MMOs

Your work makes a game overflowing with awesome content possible. Excellent tools double or triple the productivity of each designer and artist, and make the impossible, possible. You believe tools shouldn’t be “rough around the edges”; they should be polished, well thought-out, and most of all, FUN to use. If the tools you create don’t match the highest standards, how can the games you design?

A Typical Day

You start off spending your morning finishing off a new, fast, indexed search system for game assets. It’s finally done, and the artists who normally spend ten minutes at a time thrashing around just to find one specific asset can now spend more time drawing and less time searching. That three weeks of work just saved the team years of effort, and you can see the results in their productivity. Afterward, while looking through your email, you notice one of the designers mentioning he’s been spending a lot of time doing a task you realize could be automated. You outline a fix that should make the designer’s life easier, get a design together, and start working on a new tool.

Who You Work With the Most

Because the editor interfaces with everyone, you end up working with the entire team. You work with gameplay programmers extensively, defining data standards and supporting new features for the designers and artists to use. You work with designers, artists, and world builders, figuring out what tools you can create to improve their work and talking to them about their needs and what new features you can implement.

What You’ve Done Before

• Prior experience creating great tools, user interfaces or workflows.
• Significant experience and capability with C#.
• Deep understanding of threading and event model within C# and WPF a plus.
• Additional experience with C/C++
• Experience integrating applications with SQL databases.
• Experience designing & implementing GUIs. WPF experience a plus.
• Passion for creating great online games.
• Great people skills, able to work in multi-disciplinary, team oriented environments.
• A sense of fun.