Now Hiring! An additional Unity Developer, Gameplay Programmer!

We are finally beginning our search for additional crew members on Project Morningstar! :)

https://radianhelix.com/gameplay-programmer-on-project-morningstar-mar2022

Check out the post above! 

Share it with your Unity game dev friends!

Since August 2020 and the release of save-our-ship 2.4's big combat update, we've been doing the pre-production & early production on Project Morningstar. In that time we've established tests of all the basics and outlined our greatest risk areas. That includes documenting findings on our exploratory prototypes, and generating the art pipelines & templates that make it easy to rapidly produce content. 

We've also been adjusting approaches to the methods we've established or tried, to remain performant as the scope scales up too, avoiding some of the pitfalls of our inspiring genre peers. Modding taught us a lot about managing scope, and how best to avoid performance woes as that scope get more complicated.

There's been a philosophy of taking our time and really creating something rich with lore and rewarding to play. Not rushing into things, and ensuring the path ahead is clear for a concerted effort to build the alpha with a full staff. All the stuff you need for a clear roadmap that avoids the biggest pitfalls on a project this ambitious. 

The game is designed to be lightweight, quick to iterate, and easy to make content for. Doable by a team of 2 artists, 2 coders, and sound. 

We're at 4/5 now, and have worked together for years at this point. It's a solid team, no drama, very relaxed, pay on time, and the daily routines are well established. We're ready to sprint forward to meet the needs of a full time coder.

With the big UI project nearing completion, and Symbol (our scripting language & serialization tool) coming into maturity, we can start looking to bring onboard that 2nd coder, and kick off our push towards alpha.

Our new Gameplay Programmer will be responsible for tools such as our Visual doTween Interface, which produces our animation files through a UI our artists can use. After that, helping refine the combat game-feel with the state machine that drives AI behavior & animation stages. 

***Help us look!***

We're looking for experienced Unity devs. Probably with finished games solo or part of an indie team, game jammers, or Unity tool devs! 

They need C# and XML experience. If they've used doTween or Odin Serializer, we use those tools throughout our project. The tools we need will need to utilize them as well.

Modders of RimWorld and StarSector or related games are a huge plus, as our data architecture will be familiar to just how moddable & public those games are. Similar in scope as well.

Devs who have worked on Colony Sims & RTS type games, Hack & Slash 2D combat games -- that's our blend of genres. Coders on past projects like that are a huge plus. 

ECS and DOTS are fairly novel systems we would like to look into more as well. Not many devs know them yet, but familiarity and interest in using these data oriented approaches in a game where you may have a ton of procedurally generated characters, on procgen maps, is a huge plus. We'll need to take advantage of the threading of processes, Jobs System, and Burst to support our large towns and battles. 

We've got some theories on how best to optimize big scale battles with lots of Procgen. Some working prototypes of map generation that we'd like to kick off. We'd need help putting into practice while Kent, currently pulling triple duty as VC, backend coder, UI coder, etc etc, gets much needed relief to focus on just one thing at a time. 

It's a big job!

Full time. We'll do short contracts to get our toolsets done by a coder who can finish expediently as we test it to confirm it meets our needs & later provide support too. But we'd love a full timer. 

This will be an employee position. Pay is a little low at 22-28$/hr, but it's indie, and we are self-funded. We can increase that hourly if it's a short term contract, but would need to seek additional funding to cover more than that long term. We can discuss stake in future profits if they are long term.

If one of you knows the right person, I'd love to talk with them!

Have them message us through the portal linked above, or here, or on discord. :)