Spry Fox Making Happiness

NOTE: We are no longer accepting applications for this position.

We’re looking for a designer to help lead the team working on one of our original, cozy games. As a Game Designer at Spry Fox, you will plan, design, iterate and improve the player experience in our games. You’ll create new non-violent activities, events, quests, narrative moments and joyful secrets. You’ll plan new updates and help set the vision for the player’s long-term journey.

For this position, we are requiring 4+ years of professional game design work experience on at least 1 commercially-shipped title. This is not a junior position.

We welcome candidates from anywhere in the Americas, Europe and Africa (timezone-wise, these locations have proven workable for our studio in the past.)

Job Responsibilities 

• Design and extend systems and content that provides daily delight to players looking for kindness and relaxation. 
• Planning future updates including scope, theming, trade-offs and risks.
• Writing specs for features and knowing what to cut and what to keep. 
• Work closely with other disciplines to build features that meet product goals

Candidate Requirements (not optional)

• 4+ years of professional game design work experience
• Shipped at least 1 commercial game in a game design role with a team of 5+ people
• Deep familiarity with life-sim genre, especially of Animal Crossing
• Shipped or worked on rich crafting and economic systems
• Strong communication skills, both writing and voice. 

Desirable Skills 

• Professional experience as an artist, writer or programmer is always a big plus
• Project management experience is a big plus
• Experience planning updates for shipped games
• Narrative design experience

What are we offering?

• 40 hours a week: we treat crunch like the result of serious mistakes that we’ve made, not a natural and inevitable part of the development process.
• Interesting, original work as part of a small, supportive team full of thoughtful people who care about each other and care about our impact on our players’ lives.
• The opportunity to work on a game that improves people’s lives.
• Work from home, always and forever. We’ve always been fully remote and we’re never going to have an office.

Please send your full resume, references, and anything else you think we should see to jobs@spryfox.com.

What’s it like working for Spry Fox?

Spry Fox’s motto is “make the world a better place.” We try to do that through the games we make, whether that’s by designing MMOs that encourage the development of friendships, or by designing our life sim, Cozy Grove, to encourage empathy, or by designing our puzzle game, Alphabear 2, to promote English language learning. We’re always asking ourselves “how does this game improve your life?”

We also strive to be a company that is a pleasure to work for. We hope to be an important but not dominating part of your life. We want you to have friends, family, hobbies, and a life outside of work. We want you to love your colleagues and know that they support you 100%. We want you to be proud of what you do and how you do it.

We make highly original games. Invention is part of our DNA. You’ll be working on designs that often don’t fit in a comfy genre box.

We’re fully remote, and have always (12+ years) been fully remote, which means you have the flexibility to work your 40 hours a week from where ever you like, and in whatever configuration you’d like. This is not something we’re just trying to adapt to in response to the pandemic. As long as you have an overlap with your team almost every day, let people know what you’re up to, and don’t leave the rest of us hanging, almost anything goes.

We currently have Foxes in Europe, South Africa, South America, Canada, and the US. We have a retreat once a year to come together, bond, discuss the long-term future of projects and the company, and stay up way too late chatting around campfires.

We have lives outside of work. Lots of us have children. Different Foxes enjoy playing music, reading books, storytelling RPGs, and traveling.

Spry Fox recognizes crunch is a negative and counter-productive practice in our industry. We consider more than a couple of weeks of crunch in a year to be a serious failure of management — something to be learned from and avoided in the future. And we have never crunched for more than six continuous weeks in the eleven year history of our studio (a blemish consigned to our distant past, hopefully forever.)