Technical Gameplay Designer (Creatures)

At Gardens Interactive, we believe that games have the power to connect people and foster meaningful relationships. Our studio is dedicated to creating critically acclaimed and commercially successful live-service games through a sustainable and collaborative development process.

As a Gameplay Designer focused on creatures, you will shape the heart of our world’s living inhabitants. You will design, refine, and implement systems that bring creatures to life through responsive and engaging behaviors in both combat and non-combat scenarios. Your work will ensure our worlds feel alive, dynamic, and filled with opportunities for meaningful player interaction.

A Day In The Life:

• Prototype, iterate, and maintain creature behaviors and abilities for both combat and non-combat scenarios in an online multiplayer environment.

• Own the implementation and continuous maintenance of creature behaviors using Unreal Behaviors Trees and Blackboards from prototyping to polish.

• Collaborate with engineers, artists, animators, and audio designers to bring your creature designs to the player experience.

You Will:

• Own creatures, their abilities, and their behaviors while staying aligned with gameplay design and leadership.

• Collaborate with cross-disciplinary partners to align creature design with art, narrative, 3C’s gameplay, and technical requirements.

• Balance and tune difficulty and behavior to create engaging encounters for multiplayer situations.

• Advocate for the player experience, ensuring creature interactions are fun, surprising, and memorable.

• Partner with Animation to tune movement sets and provide pathfinding logic to ensure locomotion feels grounded and purposeful.

• Act as a key bridge between Art/Animation and Engineering to troubleshoot visual state logic and optimize creature performance.

You Bring:

• Understanding of how players approach multiplayer play in order to create compelling and engaging creatures (and creature behaviors) that elevate the player experience.

• Strong collaboration skills with the ability to communicate ideas clearly and succinctly.

• Strong playtesting and iteration habits to maintain creative goals while also having a focus on how design decisions affect interpersonal player behavior and relationships.

Bonus Points:

• Extensive Unreal Engine experience, with strong proficiency in Unreal Engine Behavior Trees, Blackboards, and Blueprint Scripting.

• Experience working with and strong understanding of the Gameplay Ability System (GAS) in Unreal Engine.

• Passion for ecological design, systemic worldbuilding, or player-driven emergent gameplay.

• Love for and understanding of the animal kingdom, creature biology, and natural ecologies.

The Team:

• This role reports to the Co-Design Leads.

How We Work

We believe great games are built by people who care deeply about both the work and one another. Our values guide how we collaborate, solve problems, make decisions, and grow together. They're practical behaviors, not slogans, and they're part of how we hire, give feedback, and support one another every day.

We're looking for teammates who are excited to:

• Stay curious and ask thoughtful questions.

• Adapt when plans change.

• Exercise good judgment rather than chase perfection.

• Care for the success of the whole team, not just their own work.

• Pursue ambitious goals while remaining humble enough to keep learning.

• Commit fully to the shared adventure we're building together.

You'll Thrive Here If...

• You enjoy asking questions before jumping to conclusions.

• You adapt comfortably when priorities evolve.

• You balance ambition with pragmatism.

• You communicate thoughtfully and seek feedback.

• You care about helping your teammates succeed.

• You embrace uncertainty as part of creating something new.

Please Note: Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States or Canada. Gardens cannot assist with work authorizations or work visas. Applicants must also be willing to work within North American time zones (EST–PST).

Our Interview Process

(all interviews are 1 hour video calls on Google Meet unless otherwise noted)

• Step 1: People Operations Introduction

• Step 2: Hiring Manager Interview

• Step 3: Panel Interview (3 - 1 Hour Sections)

• Step 4: Gardeners Debrief

• Step 5: Offer

Life at Gardens

Gardens is a fully distributed game studio founded by creators behind titles including Journey, What Remains of Edith Finch, Blaseball, Dustforce, Ashen, Guild Wars 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, and more.

We're developing our flagship project: a multiplayer fantasy adventure inspired by the friendships, discoveries, and unforgettable stories that emerge when people explore together.

We believe the best ideas come from teams with diverse experiences, perspectives, backgrounds, and ways of thinking. Every Gardener helps shape not only what we build, but how we build it.

Each of us arrives by a different path, bringing unique experiences, perspectives, and ways of seeing the world. That range is part of what makes our games and our studio better than any one of us could build alone.

Gardens Offers:

• Competitive salaries and pay transparency

• Stock options

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage (100% for individuals, 90% for dependents)

• Life insurance, short-term and long-term disability, and additional benefits

• 401(k) contributions (U.S.) / RRSP + DPSP contributions (Canada)

• Paid parental leave

• A fully distributed remote studio across North American time zones

Benefits and perks listed may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Gardens and the country in which you work.

Physical Requirements: This is a primarily sedentary, remote role requiring the ability to remain stationary and perform computer-based work for extended periods, including sustained use of monitors, keyboards, mice, and game controllers for a minimum of six hours per day. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable qualified individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of the role. Gardens is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.

Encouragement: We believe that diverse perspectives make our team stronger and our games better. If you're excited about this role but don't meet every single qualification, we encourage you to apply anyway.

Research consistently shows that talented people, particularly women, people of color, and those from historically underrepresented communities are less likely to apply unless they meet every listed requirement. We care far more about curiosity, growth, and a willingness to learn than checking every box.

Scam Note: Unfortunately, scammers have impersonated Gardens Interactive by offering fake employment opportunities intended to collect financial information.

Official communication from our team will always come from a @gardens.dev email address. We will never ask for financial information during the hiring process.

If you're ever unsure whether a message is legitimate, please contact us directly through LinkedIn or [email protected]