Adam here! We are actively seeking a sound designer to join our team and work on our new indie game Overland. We are also on a mission to build a more inclusive studio with more diverse teams, and so we strongly encourage applications from people from backgrounds that aren’t always represented in the games industry. If you fit this description or know people who do, we would be grateful if you could pass this posting on! I’ve got some more details about this toward the end of the post. image WHAT IS OVERLAND? Overland is a turn-based survival game. It is still what we call a prototype, but if you imagine playing a board game where you move some figurines of civilians and monsters around a chessboard full of rubble, you might have some idea of what the game is like at the moment. The fictional world in which Overland takes place could be reasonably described as post-apocalyptic, empty, and hostile. Players guide a band of survivors on a long journey to… somewhere, relying on a kind of hand-me-down map that helps them find the safer places to pick up supplies on the way. This world has been picked over, though, so you won’t be finding a lot of guns, for example. There are even some good reasons to not kill every monster you see, but we don’t want to spoil too much yet… the important thing to us is that players will make some hard choices while they play, and every choice players make has consequences. One thing that we hope will make Overland stand out is that the characters you meet and with whom you travel are basically normal people. There will be doctors and mechanics and carpenters but also just moms and pensioners. Humans, as it were; not superheroes. We also have a lot of ideas about how we can illustrate relationships between survivors and the obstacles they face on their travels, but these elements are still pretty nebulous. They will play a big role in the final game though! Does this sound like something you want to work on? YES THIS IS MY DREAM PROJECT. WHAT WOULD I BE DOING? Making all sound effects, music and ambience for the whole game. Everything about the way the game sounds would be up to you. Your vision (as it were) for the soundscape is important to us. We are looking for a fourth brain to join us on this adventure, to work with us to build the best game we can. We are looking for someone who can help us to complete these weird new world we are trying to build. Your primary domain will be the sound design, but if you have ideas for new game mechanics, new scenarios, new story ideas, whatever you think would make the game better, lay it on us! For us this is what it means to be a creative partner on the project. That said, you won’t be joining a blank slate project. There are some aspects of Overland that we feel strongly about, and we are looking forward to working with you to help amplify those things and to build up the rest of the game’s audio accordingly. We are doing our best to create a flexible and communicative team environment where there is both direction and self-expression. I will do my best to articulate my ideas about what might be possible with the sound design, and I am looking forward to hearing your ideas for what this world sounds like too. WHAT DO YOU THINK IT SHOULD SOUND LIKE? I’ve been really lucky, and have had the opportunity to collaborate with some really brilliant sound designers in the past. I’ve worked on games with chippy soundscapes, cinematic backdrops, and even weirder things like Capsule. Overland is not explicitly a horror game, exactly, but I think the sound design in games like Capsule or Silent Hill is getting close to the right ballpark for what we’re building. I think the audio in The Swapper is pretty sharp too. I’ve also been referencing movies like The Thing and Alien internally, but that’s because I’m a hopeless cliché; there are probably cooler or more interesting references out there, like these amazing sub-antarctic hydrophone recordings. The thing we’re most interested in is creating something that doesn’t really sound like anything else. I know that’s not the most useful thing to say after giving a bunch of references, but maybe those references are best for getting a sense of the fidelity and detail we’re interested in, not the exact reference sounds themselves. Overland is a road-trip game, in some ways, and is about being in big empty spaces with no help, with very, very strange things surrounding you. We have our work cut out for us on the art side, to bring this to life, but we’re hoping to find someone who can step up and create an equally weird and unique soundscape to accompany the player on their journey. If you have a vision for a non-traditional, beautiful and practical approach for a game like this, we want to see it! SWEET. GIMME THE DIRTY DEETS So earlier I very specifically described Overland as an indie game, which was intentional, because it is a key part of our business model. Our goal is to build a four person team: designer (me), programmer (Shay), artist (announcing soon!!), and an audio person (you??). When the project is released, the vast majority of the revenue from the game will be divided up between the four team members basically forever. As a creative partner you will be entitled to the sort of rev share that comes along with that. To help pay the bills until release, we can also provide monthly advances. These advances must be paid back out of the rev share at launch, but hopefully they help bridge the gap between start of project and launch. This is not a salaried position, and there are no healthcare or retirement benefits associated with it. In tax terms, you will be a self-employed contractor or freelancer. The current plan is to start production on the full game in April, and launch as a paid alpha on Humble and Steam in Q3 or Q4 2014. We will probably continue active development until mid-2015, when I expect the pace of updates to slow down. Also, please keep in mind that since this is an indie game, those dates are subject to change!! We will do our very best to stick to those guns though. WHERE DO I SIGN UP Please email me (adam@finjigames.com) with a link to your portfolio ASAP. Please include the words “overland sound designer” and your name in the subject line. We are going to be looking for:

    * good communication skills, ability to articulate new ideas * work with a strong identity and personality (unconventional is great) * atmosphere and environmental storytelling * work done outside of jobs/school * sound designers that have shipped something (doesn’t need to be a game)

These are what you might call our “must-haves”. We are NOT looking for people with 10+ years of industry experience (though that wouldn’t disqualify someone either!), and we are NOT looking for reels of sort of generic gamey sounds (though again those won’t disqualify someone). Our primary interest is in finding something that sounds different and sounds like Overland. Some things that would be nice to have but could probably just be learned on the job might include:

    * Integrating sounds into Unity games * Building generative or procedural sounds * Third party sound engines like FMod or Wwise * Interactive sound design experience (variations etc) * Music composition

Also as we said above we have a specific interest in building a diverse team, and can’t stress enough how badly we want awesome people to apply for this position, regardless of race or gender. This is a crucial step in making Overland the best game it can be. If you’re the sort of person who normally wouldn’t apply for a gig because of discrimination or a perceived lack of experience, we want to see your portfolio!! We’re not necessarily looking for the most experienced or most conventional sound designer; we need something special and new. That’s it I guess. I can’t wait to hear from you :) ONE PERSON OR TWO? This is a question I’ve got more than I expected, but I totally understand where it’s coming from and wanted to address it real quick. On a lot of games (and some of my past games) composing music and creating the sound effects are COMPLETELY different disciplines, which I totally understand. There are two things that I think I need to clarify in regards to Overland specifically though:

    * Currently I am not imagining Overland having a full like suite/soundtrack/score in the sense of a traditional action game or movie or whatever. This could change but I think we will probably use music sparingly, with a very strong focus on diegetic sound, for a variety of reasons. * For this specific role, we are really trying to hire our fourth brain for the project, the brain that is mostly focused on what is the audio and how does it contribute to the overall experience. We are looking for someone who will be able to generate or produce the kind of diegetic sound, ambient sound and sound effects that will populate the bulk of our game world, but also will be thinking up just what those things are and why they’re important.

So if you are an audio designer who feels a connection to this game idea or this pitch, but maybe you’re not a great music composer, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem, there are a lot of ways we can work around that. Ok! Hope that helps :) Thanks again!