The Stuff
We’ve hired our first engineer, and have posted two additional roles:
Who we’re looking for
There’s a commonality in every role we’re hiring for: we’re looking for people who are great collaborators on experimental efforts.
There are a lot dimensions to this:
- You need the drive to tackle problems that are outside of your domain of expertise when there are gaps that are needed to be filled.
- You need confidence facing uncertainty that you and the team can figure out a path forward, and cleverness to find ways to address ambiguity.
- You need the bravery to take risks and try things that might not work out.
- You need to be improvisational, and take a “yes, and…” approach to development, taking inspiration from the work done by your collaborators and building on it, and finding ways around situations that didn’t go as expected.
We haven’t figured out a descriptive, concise way to describe this, so we’ve simply been referring to it as “The Stuff.”
To speak specifically about the roles we’ve opened, the Principal Artist position is a good example: there are many opportunities to specialize in 3D art production, but we are looking for a generalist who’s excited about working across the pipeline, from modeling to rigging to animation. The seniority of this role has flexibility: we’d be happy to talk to candidates experienced as an art director who are excited about getting more hands-on with the work, and also happy to talk to candidates earlier in their career who are excited to develop their skills working across the 3D art pipeline in a range of styles.
Likewise, for the Part-time Community Manager role, we’re looking for someone who can help us engage more proactively with our community, but can also help us develop our strategy for creating more transparency around our development process and growing our audience, which includes participating in pitching and brainstorming new experiments.
Working at 2weeks
There are a several distinctive aspects to working at 2weeks vs. a traditional game development studio.
First (and perhaps most obviously), we are a startup. Startups are risky on multiple dimensions. The most straightforward risk is financial runway. We think we have a good path to profitability, but it has yet to be proven. Many startups don’t make it.
Even startups that do reach profitability often find arrive there by a different path than they expected to take. Another big risk joining a startup is the kind of work that compelled you to join changing in unexpected ways. Startups are subject to much more volatility than an established studio that has found success with a particular way of working. We have a lot of conviction in our strategy, encapsulated in our tagline, “making games on the open web for you and your friends,” but we have a lot to learn about what works well and what doesn’t with this approach.
These risks aren’t particularly unique to 2weeks, though; they apply to all startups. The big difference between 2weeks and other studios is how we work:
- We specialize in rapid prototyping. We frequently build entirely new experiences from scratch over short timelines. The work is heavily improvisational, and we don’t give ourselves the luxury of working on concepts for extended periods of time before shipping and testing them.
- We value experimentation. We don’t stick to a particular style or genre, and intentionally choose to build experiments that are distinctive from each other to test strongly differentiated concepts. This means the work changes significantly from project to project. This translates to wearing a lot of hats, not deeply specializing in a particular aspect of the craft.
- We work in public. We ship our experiments directly to players when they have just barely come together to gauge people’s reaction as early as possible. We also strive to be transparent about our overall development process as well. Our community is doing us a great favor by playing and reacting to our experiments, and we try to return that favor by being open about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. It is unusual to share work this early and create this level of visibility into the development process, and requires a mix of both vulnerability and fortitude.
- We’re building our own tech. Our custom engine, Tweaks, is built from the ground up for rapid prototyping on the web. It’s also very early in development, which means lots of functionality still being built and few of the tooling conveniences of a mature game engine. It’s a great opportunity to help build something from scratch tailored to a unique use case. That said, it won’t help you sharpen your skills with the engines and tools most commonly used across the industry.
If you think you’ve got The Stuff and the way we work excites you more than it scares you off, we’d love to hear from you! Follow the links above for more info on the specific roles and send us an application.