[MUD-Dev] JOB: R&D slots at SOE San Diego

[Koster, Raph]

I've got job openings for a server programmer, a designer, and an
animator in my R&D group, located in San Diego.

My R&D group is:

  - small. We'll grow to a half dozen people this year. I run the
  group; there's a producer reporting to me that everyone else
  reports to.

  - doing wacky cool stuff. We did a demonstration of artificial
  life as a worldbuilding tool that was one of the Playstation 3
  tech demos.

  - focused not on tools but on useful stuff. We don't build
  libraries for other people. We build proofs of concept of stuff
  that nobody else would make.

  - nimble. If something isn't showing results in two weeks, we kill
  it and move on. We have stuff like a working plot generator for
  arbitrary numbers of characters shelved because we didn't know
  what to do with it.  The research agenda is largely whatever
  strikes me as being interesting to pursue.

  - working on actual gameplay. We don't just make tech. We make
  actual games to prove the tech. At some point, we'll actually
  release one, we hope.

Programmer:

  The position is for someone to work on the server. They should be
  capable of tackling stuff like shardless world architectures and
  also stuff like combat systems based on actual fencing rules. They
  should be less worried about shipping a box than they are about
  making cool stuff.  They should be people willing to question
  basic assumptions about how games are made, while having a solid
  knowledge of the stuff they are questioning.  They should not be
  exclusively specialists--we have no room for such on a team with
  only two programmers. They should not be overly academic or overly
  engineering-focused; we do hack a lot, and cut corners, because we
  want to see whether things work. We clean it up afterwards if
  somebody wants to use it.

Designer:

  The position is ideally for someone detail-oriented, interested in
  doing gameplay that isn't like current MMO/MUD gameplay,
  interested in audiences other than the typical elves-and-swords
  audience. Someone capable of filling in endless tables for stats
  and also of designing a nifty embedded minigame and then implement
  it using code or a scripting language.

Animator:

  Some level of 2d or classic animation background preferred.

I believe that the standard job description gobbledegook is up on
the SOE site or will be shortly. The jobs do require relocating to
San Diego.

Email me if the above sounds of interest.

-Raph
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