Craft:

Job Description:

Principal Game Designer (Puzzle Core)

Help craft the moment to moment magic of a new King Game

Join our New Games Studio and help build the next generation of King experiences. We’re developing a new casual puzzle game and we’re looking for a Principal Game Designer to help shape the feel, challenge, and moment to moment fun of the game.

In this role, you will design and evolve the core puzzle gameplay, including level mechanics, blockers, moment to moment interaction systems, and overall difficulty progression that define the player experience.

Working closely project Leadership, you will help craft gameplay that is deeply satisfying, approachable, and scalable across thousands of levels, ensuring that the game delivers both delightful player experiences and strong long term engagement.

Your Role Within Our Kingdom

As a Principal Game Designer, you will play a key role in defining and refining the core gameplay systems of the game, helping ensure the puzzle experience remains engaging, readable, and satisfying for players across the entire progression journey.

You will work closely with other designers, artists, engineers, and product partners to bring gameplay features to life and ensure they align with both the creative vision and the broader game strategy.

You will:

• Design and iterate on the core puzzle gameplay, ensuring the moment-to-moment interaction feels satisfying, responsive, and accessible.

• Create and evolve blockers and level mechanics, developing gameplay elements that introduce challenge, variety, and strategic depth.

• Help define the overall gameplay feel, including pacing, readability, clarity, and player feedback.

• Collaborate with design leadership team to ensure blockers and mechanics integrate well into the wider level progression.

• Partner with Product Managers and Data Scientists to analyse player behaviour and tune gameplay difficulty, progression, and engagement.

• Prototype and develop new gameplay mechanics, exploring ideas that enhance the puzzle experience and expand the game’s design space.

• Ensure gameplay systems align with the game’s broader meta and economy systems, working with systems and economy designers when necessary.

• Maintain high standards of design quality, balancing creative ambition with technical constraints and production realities.

• Document and clearly communicate gameplay designs, ensuring teams across disciplines understand design goals and player outcomes.

• Identify and communicate design risks early, working closely with producers and engineers to ensure smooth delivery.

• Stay connected to the market, analysing puzzle and casual games to identify emerging trends and opportunities.

• Contribute to the studio’s design craft community, sharing learnings and supporting the growth of fellow designers.

Skills to Create Thrills

• Experience working on mobile games, particularly free to play titles.

• Strong passion for casual mobile games and meta game design.

• Proven experience designing meta systems, progression frameworks, or long term engagement mechanics in successful games.

• Strong understanding of player motivation, progression design, and long term engagement loops.

• Experience designing systems that connect gameplay with progression, rewards, and feature unlocks.

• Analytical mindset with the ability to interpret player behaviour and data insights to guide iteration.

• Experience collaborating within multidisciplinary teams, balancing creative, technical, and product perspectives.

• Strong organisational skills with the ability to drive features from concept through delivery.

• Clear and effective communicator verbally, visually, and in written documentation.

• Comfortable working in fast-moving development environments where systems evolve through iteration.

• Experience working on Sorting / Match Pair / Match 3D mechanics is especially valuable.

Game Experience

We’re looking for someone with a strong background in creating video games and a passion for designing compelling casual meta experiences. Mobile development comes with unique opportunities and constraints, requiring a balance of creativity, insight, and technical awareness. We want someone who embraces those challenges with enthusiasm and a desire to craft experiences that will delight millions of players around the world.

We’re Seriously Playful

Officially, we’re a leading interactive entertainment company for the mobile world. Unofficially, we’re a serious business that takes pride in having fun. Every day at King, we blend intuition with analysis, art with science, and imagination with execution to craft games the world loves to play.

Our mission is simple: bring moments of magic to everyday life. If that excites you, we’d love to hear from you.

A great saga needs all sorts of heroes

Making games is fun. Especially when you do it with people who share the same idea of what makes a good workplace great.

We design games for everyone, no matter where they are or who they are, and we employ all sorts of people from all kinds of backgrounds to bring them to life.

Truth is, we simply can’t expect diversity in our players and originality in our games without first nurturing it in our people. A great saga needs all sorts of heroes.

About King

With a mission of Making the World Playful, King is a leading interactive entertainment company for the mobile world with more than 20 years of history of delivering some of the world’s most iconic games in the mobile gaming industry, including the world-famous Candy Crush franchise, as well as other mobile titles such as Farm Heroes Saga. Around 200 million people play a King game every month. King, part of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), has Kingsters in Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Malta. More information can be found at King.com or by following us on LinkedIn and @lifeatking on Instagram.