Senior Systems Game Designer

Astro Nomad Studios is a new, small, distributed game studio backed by AIC. We are building original, expressive games with strong mechanical identity, memorable worlds, and a focus on player discovery, mastery, and adventure.

We are looking for a Senior Systems Game Designer to help architect, prototype, tune, and connect the gameplay systems at the heart of our current project, with a particular focus on roguelike/roguelite structure, build variety, progression, and replayability.

This is a hands-on senior design role for someone who can think deeply about mechanics, model and tune complex systems, communicate clearly with a small team, and turn abstract gameplay goals into practical, testable, shippable systems.

• Architect, model, and balance interconnected gameplay systems, including combat rules, traversal, abilities, upgrades, encounters, resources, progression, reward economies, and run structure.
• Design systems that support roguelike/roguelite replayability, including buildcraft, synergies, risk/reward choices, intra-run progression, meta-progression, procedural variation, and difficulty escalation.
• Translate creative direction into clear systemic rules, player verbs, constraints, feedback loops, tuning targets, data structures, and implementation-ready specs.
• Work closely with leadership, engineering, level design, animation, art, and production to make sure systems are fun, readable, extensible, and buildable.
• Create precise, practical design documentation, tuning tables, state-machine breakdowns, economy models, and balance notes that help the team make decisions and implement features.
• Prototype, test, tune, and refine mechanics based on feel, readability, pacing, replayability, systemic depth, and production realities.
• Partner with engineers and technical designers to implement and iterate systems in-engine, with Unreal Engine experience especially valuable.
• Identify design risks early and help propose focused, achievable solutions that preserve depth without creating unnecessary complexity.
• Support the creation of a game that rewards curiosity, mastery, movement, exploration, experimentation, and player discovery.

• Demonstrated experience designing gameplay systems for roguelike/roguelite, run-based, action, combat, traversal, or similarly mechanics-driven games.
• Strong systems-design instincts: you understand how rules, numbers, probabilities, player verbs, feedback loops, and constraints interact to create emergent play.
• Experience designing or tuning build variety, upgrade synergies, reward structures, difficulty curves, progression systems, economies, or combat/ability systems.
• Ability to break down complex gameplay ideas into simple, testable components, then tune them through iteration, data, player feel, and team feedback.
• Comfort working with formulas, spreadsheets, tuning tables, probability, scaling math, or lightweight simulations to support design decisions.
• Hands-on experience prototyping or implementing systems in a modern game engine. Unreal Engine experience, including Blueprint and/or C++, is especially relevant, though strong experience in Unity, Godot, proprietary engines, or similar tools is also welcome.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to create documentation that engineers, artists, animators, designers, and producers can actually use.
• Comfort working in a small team where roles may overlap, priorities change, and ownership matters.
• Good taste in systemic design — not just adding mechanics, but knowing what should be removed, simplified, clarified, or tuned.
• A practical mindset: you care about what can actually be built, tested, balanced, and improved.

• Shipped-title experience or…