We are looking for a Senior Gameplay programmer who will develop our main title and programming team at Virtual Amusement Worlds!

About Virtual Amusement Worlds

We are a new game studio and publisher situated in Malmö looking to develop games that challenge the game industry’s “status quo”. As we open our first office in Malmö we are looking for talented people to lead our development and help shape our DNA to become a leading force within our genre.

Here you will be able to be a part of the foundation, with all that this entails, building a game as well as a studio from the ground up. We are currently a small but rapidly growing team of developers and designers who gather under the vision of our first big project. We want to welcome you who wish to push the boundaries and create something genre-breaking, and join the VAW Family.

About our main title: Zegelon Arena

Our sole focus currently is the development of a game titled Zegelon. An FPS slasher set in a fantasy world with a naturalistic tone. The game is PvP based with special focus on character creation and development, player combat and “hardcore” gameplay. Taking inspiration from classic tabletop roleplaying games of the 80s and 90s.

Role Description

As a Senior Gameplay Programmer, you will be responsible for a wide range of tasks and should expect a variety of issues and challenges to tackle across various areas of the game. This will include the implementation of new features as well as debugging and optimizing existing ones. In addition, the role requires excellent communication skills as you will be collaborating closely with team members from other departments.

The ideal candidate would have a keen interest in participating in the design process. This person would play a significant role in getting features from paper to the player by working collaboratively with Design, Art, and QA departments. They must be a team player, willing to help others identify problems and seek creative solutions.

You will be joining the team at an early stage, growing with it from the start. There will be a big focus on collaboration, sharing experiences, and ensuring best practices.

These are things you’ll do on the job 

• Maintain regular internal communications and encourage a positive and ambitious team atmosphere
• Demonstrate good leadership, enthusiasm and sense of commitment
• Take responsibility for recruitment, on-boarding, development and professional training of the programming team
• Be responsible for scoping tasks, working to deadlines, and communicating with production and if problems arise.
• Collaborate with Design and Production to establish achievable goals.
• Propose solutions to improve the development of projects in the studio
• Lead and manage a programming team at technical and personnel level
• Provide estimate time to complete programming task/objectives and be committed to meet them
• Help in setting up best practices for coding and conduct regular code reviews
• Encourage and help guide the creation of technical design documents
• Setup a process to review the game on a regular interval during development cycle and identify area of improvement
• Collaborate with Directors, Designers and Production to ensure efficient development practices
• Ensure that solid coding practices, technical briefs and code reviews are maintained
• Maintain a strong understanding of multiplayer FPS games
• Collaborate with the programming team to develop fully realised and working game systems.
• Communicate and collaborate with the Programming & Design Team to assist in delivering polished and immersive gaming experiences that meet design and technical requirements.
• Create and maintain game logic for gameplay mechanics and other supporting gameplay systems.
• Communicate with QA to help track down and fix bugs.
• Work within the specification guidelines of the project and technology, keeping performance in mind as well as working with others to debug potential issues.
• Profiling and optimising code for memory and performance considerations on a per-platform basis.
• Work with different release platforms, making sure that the games are well suited to each platform
• Look for optimizations that can be made in the projects and be part of implementing the solutions

These are things your CV already contains

• Strong communication and problem-solving skills
• Ability to write clear, maintainable, portable code
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English
• At least 5 years professional video game programming experience
• C++ proficiency
• High degree of self-motivation and initiative-taking
• An understanding and passion for video games
• Predilection and the ability to take on research and self-education
• A bachelor degree in Computer Science, Software Engineers, or equivalent.
• Experience in developing AAA titles on multiple console platforms
• Comfortable wandering around unexplored game design territory, and excited to help refine ideas into shippable features
• 1 year of Unreal Engine experience. Demonstrate excellent understanding of Unreal Engines tools and actor based pipeline.
• Strong understanding of content structure and management of C++ code bases with the ability to quickly learn existing code bases.
• Good level of debugging skills, with the ability to perform profiling and optimisation.
• Strong Knowledge of Unreal Engine blueprint logic and gameplay logic assemblies.
• Able to quickly create prototypes to match design criteria.
• Understanding of sound programming practices.
• Practical problem solving applicable to 3D game development.

Bonus if you also have

• Experience working with continuous integration and automated testing.
• Have, or are pursuing, a B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, or an equivalent degree
• Experience with game optimization
• Experience with debugging optimized x86 executables
• Previous experience as a Senior Programmer on a shipping/live game
• Previous experience in small/medium-sized development studios
• Multiplayer development experience.
• Experience using Unreal Engine’s replication systems.
• Experienced with giving and receiving code reviews.
• Knowledge of multiple areas of programming (Engine, AI, UI, Audio, Gameplay, Physics, Rendering, Multiplayer).
• Experience developing for and deploying to consoles (Xbox One, PS4 or other).
• Experience working on and maintaining live games.
• Knowledge and experience writing code for telemetry capture systems in live games in order to determine a features success and help drive future content.

Demonstrate The Ability To…

• Think critically about the requirements of a game mechanic or features.
• Self motivate and have pride in your work.
• Work and communicate well within a team and studio environment.
• Create high quality UML for planning the correct structure for your code.
• Be adaptive and master new tools in the process if required.
• Take critique and guidance from others well.
• Manage your time effectively to achieve the highest quality results.