Narrative Designer

Finitude; United States; Remote; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Finitude’s Narrative Designer role invites you to build a 13th-century world for Kinstrife, blending narrative with systems-driven gameplay. You’ll design and develop characters, quests, factions, and core themes, turning historical research into immersive experiences while partnering with a systems designer.

You’ll shape the vibe, backstories, and long-running arcs, craft reactive quests with multiple solutions, and ensure the world feels alive beyond exposition.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience designing worlds and quests for systemic, non-linear and/or open-ended games, through a shipped title or reference work.
• Strong instincts for vibe, worldbuilding and tone with taste to improve the game.
• Thinking in systems—consider stories within gameplay structure, not just prose.
• Ability to turn obscure topics into interesting, playable content.
• Self-driven and team-oriented with a clear design goal from research to delivery.

Responsibilities

• Own the “vibe”: define experiential qualities and align systems/content to that target flavour.
• Iterate on core themes so they land through play rather than exposition.
• Own player backstory, motivation and arc across a long campaign.
• Design quests to be reactive, multi-solution and with long-term consequences in linked systems.
• Build the game world to evoke 13th-century Germany and its mysteries, beyond mere set-dressing.
• Design companions and the player’s retinue with gameplay and choice in mind.
• Shape the choice architecture with the founders and systems designer and bring it to life.
• Develop worldbuilding, factions and characters that give the world its identity and internal logic.

Skills

Worldbuilding

Quests design

System design

Open-ended games

Fluent in English

Job description

What We’re Looking For

Join us as a Narrative Designer to build a 13th-century world that players want to lose themselves in. We develop Kinstrife, a genre-blending medieval sandbox where narrative interlocks with our systems-driven gameplay. Your task is to turn our mechanics into deeply engrossing engines of player experiences by designing and developing characters, quests, factions, the game’s core themes – if you will, the overall “vibe.” You’ll partner closely with our systems designer, and dig deep into the historical research for context and inspiration. So: If you’re the kind of person who enjoys turning obscure 13th-century chronicle entries into exciting and immersive gameplay experiences, we’d love to hear from you.

What You’ll Do

• Own the “vibe”: define the experiential and emotional qualities we should try to evoke and then help us keep our systems and content aligned to that target flavour.
• Sharpen what Kinstrife is about underneath the mechanics, by iterating on the core themes that give it meaning, and making sure they land through play rather than exposition
• Own player backstory, motivation and the arc. What makes the next step worth reaching, and what keeps players invested across a long campaign
• Design our quests and jobs to be reactive, multi-solution and with long-term consequences, all while making sure that they plug into our interlinked gameplay systems
• Build the game world in a way that makes 13th-century Germany a place players will want to discover. Add the mystery and human touch that make our setting not mere set-dressing and instead a work of art that people will be deeply invested in.
• Design companions and the player’s retinue, especially in the context of gameplay and choice, rather than as standalone characters
• Help shape the choice architecture (the range of decisions and playstyles we support) alongside the founders and systems designer, then bring it to life so that players can understand and feel their options & decisions
• Develop the worldbuilding, factions and characters that give the world its identity and internal logic, always hand-in-hand with the systems that shape the gameplay experience
• Design how players come to know the world around them, through the people they meet and the things they see without relying on a world map for the heavy lifting
• Turn historical source material into grounded, playable content, extracting the interesting bits and keeping things real without turning the game into a history lecture
• Brief, direct and quality-gate our contract writers, to keep the vibe & flavour that we’ve established across everything that ships

What’s Needed

• Demonstrated experience designing worlds and quests for systemic, non-linear and/or open-ended games, through a shipped title or other reference work
• Great instincts for vibe, worldbuilding and tone. You bring taste to the project with the goal of making the game better (and don’t always need to be right).
• Thinking in systems – you enjoy thinking about stories in their gameplay structure (like tags, states, conditions etc.), and not just prose and narrative arcs
• The ability to take an unfamiliar, obscure topic and quickly find what’s interesting and playable in it
• A fundamental understanding of system design
• Self-driven and team-oriented mentality. You work best when given context and goals, rather than daily task lists, and carry a design goal from research through to delivery.
• Fluent in English, with the ability to document clearly and collaborate effectively in a fully remote, asynchronous environment
• A passion for systemic, strategy-flavoured RPGs where the player’s story is their own

Bonus Points

• Interest or deep knowledge of the medieval period, or generally historical interest
• Familiarity with Yarn Spinner or similar narrative/dialogue tooling
• Shipped titles in Unity
• German language ability (very useful for digging into historical sources)
• Sufficient writing chops to prototype voice/tone, write briefs and set the bar for contract writers

Portfolio

Please share examples of your design work, which may include:

• Design documentation (GDDs, system specifications, feature breakdowns)
• Case studies or postmortems explaining design challenges you’ve solved
• Narrative design work
• Links to shipped games with a brief explanation of your specific contributions
• Prototypes or design experiments (paper, digital, or video documentation)
• Slides or videos of conference talks

We understand much design work is under NDA. If you can’t share anything publicly, please describe 2-3 design problems you’ve solved and your approach to solving them in a general manner.