Charlie Oscar Lima Tango, a young Vilnius-based gamedev studio, is looking for a person to spend at least three full months working with us on user interface of the upcoming 2D Steampunk card-based strategy Gremlins, Inc. made with Unity 5. Our budget for this contract is €6.000, following that we’ll make a decision on extending the contract/offering a full-time position with the studio.
A sketch of the playing field in Gremlins, Inc.
Context & team: Gremlins, Inc. is a 2D game made with Unity 5. We work on the game for 18 months by now (including the pre-production stage), and we’re about 3-4 months away from releasing the game in Steam Early Access. We have a brilliant art director and an excellent game artist who are currently fully occupied with finishing the remaining art assets (25-35% of the overall volume, at the moment). We also have a veteran game designer who is currently busy with the game’s logic and a very experienced server/client programmer who is our development lead.
One of the board prototypes we used to test the game’s mechanics during the last few months of pre-production.
Our needs: we need a person who will work with Unity 5, utilising assets generated by our artists and following directions of our programmer, to the satisfaction of our game designer and producer. We’re not a vertical-oriented team so you will have to interact with all five people on board in order to make the most of their experience and feedback.
Let’s review the pipeline using the game cards as an example:
This is how the game cards looked like back when there was only pen & paper prototype (in Word): we were already testing the mechanics , but UI here is non-existent.
These are the same cards with basic UI design, used in the board prototype. Symbols, colours, shapes are functional but there are no illustrations and certain solutions proved to be not so convenient after a hundred or so of sessions.
These are some of the notes we’ve made when the whole team was discussing the way the cards should look in the game.
This is a screenshot from one of the recent builds. The cards here look ‘kind of’ like they were designed on the white board. Tens of small decisions were made and tested, many more fixes remain to be done.
And this is a more recent version of the card from the build. Certain things improved yet quite a lot still remains to be polished.
Your work would be to start off the last draft above, and evolve it until it’s picture-perfect as well as super-functional. For example, the box with the price is too high; the gaps between the boxes with the gains/losses are too big; the boxes themselves probably need a 1px stroke in black, not in the current semi-transparent style; there are also about 7 other elements which we need to add to the card without disrupting it; and so on.
Skills: you are an artist or visual designer, with experience in layout/design work. You play videogames and board games often enough to understand the importance of UI, and you are very much detail-oriented so that you can patiently take each and every step required to balance the functional and the decorative elements of the game’s UI. We normally go through 12-20 iterations for every UI element and we will expect you to be at least as thorough.
Tools: you must have professional experience with Unity 5. You must also be very familiar with Adobe Photoshop. Communication-wise, we work with Basecamp, Asana and Slack, using Skype and Hangouts as backups.
Location: ideally, you are based in Vilnius and will work from our studio at Vilniaus gatve. We’re Okay with flexible office hours if you have kids/post-grad studies to take care of.
Alternatively, you can be based in Kiev or Minsk or any other city close by, provided that you can move over to Vilnius for the duration of this contract (three months) which will be covered by your 90-day EU stay limit.
Finally, you may be based in another city – in fact, anywhere in the world – in case your communication skills are so good, that this will not affect our dev process. But let me say this in advance: in our experience, this can only happen if you shipped games or performed client work in the same fashion before. If this will be your first games project or if you’ve never worked in a distributed team before, the stress of learning the discipline as well as the specifics of this particular project will most likely be too much to handle.
Contract/future: we offer a fixed three-month freelance contract worth €6.000 (gross). Once we’re through this period, we may extend or switch to a full-time position, depending on where we’ll be at that time/how good you are at what you do. Gremlins, Inc. is the first project of Charlie Oscar. It will ship both as a card game and as a videogame, with a possible board game a few months later. We already have designs for two following projects, a dark fantasy single-player game and a historical turn-based strategy, so we plan to be rather busy in the next few years. At the same time, we do not want to grow above 10 people to keep the communication flawless, therefore we put a lot of focus on having everyone proficient in multiple fields. Normally, if you see a production (not creative) task in Asana, almost any member of the dev team can handle it without asking for advice/delegating it to someone else.
The best thing about this contract: if you want to share this post, here’s why we think it’s a great position:
- This contract is one of the few industry jobs that does not require previous games industry experience. You need visual design skills. You need knowledge of Unity 5. But you do not need to have a few games shipped under your belt.
- The person we’ll work with, will have a chance to deep-dive into production of a new, original videogame just a few months before release. Experience like this is priceless.
- Everyone in our team shipped projects before. We’re a group of 30-40 years old guys and girls, we’re self-funded, we know what we want, there’s a lot of work – but very little hesitation. In this sense, our environment is creative without being chaotic.
HOW TO CONTACTS US:
Send us an email to sk at charlieoscar.net with a link to your LinkedIn profile/online portfolio/examples of visual design work you’ve done before, specifically addressing your Unity 5 experience. If you’re based in Vilnius, we’ll invite you for a cup of tea to the studio. If you’re based in another city, we’ll arrange a Skype call (in English or in Russian). Good luck!
