Mobile game play experience designer

Founding Gameplay Experience Designer Contract-to-Hire · Hong Kong preferred (remote considered) · Mii Labs / Mirea World You prototype the core loop in Unreal — and you are the person who decides whether it's actually fun. Who we are Mii Labs builds Mirea World, an AI-native game first habit formation experience where a player's real daily life quietly shapes an evolving world and a companion who grows alongside them. Our design principle: game outside, engine inside. The surface is play — a world, a companion, a loop worth opening every day. Underneath sits a behavioral system that reads real-life signals and feeds them back as world evolution and character progression. Think the emotional pull of Pokémon GO, the compulsion loop of Coin Master, and the identity-driven world-building of animal Crossing— welded into one coherent experience. We hold an Apple-level bar for craft and feel. If it breaks immersion for even a second, it doesn't ship. The role You own the answer to one question across the whole product: "Is this loop actually alive, or does it just look like it should be?" You'll prototype core gameplay yourself — hands on keyboard, in-engine — and you'll defend the experience's integrity as we bolt more systems on. You are the bridge between "technically works," "genuinely fun," and "emotionally seamless." This is a builder-designer hybrid, not a spec-writer. You'll work directly with the founder and CTO, and your work shapes the roadmap rather than following it. What you'll build (the arc) V1 — the core loop. A daily card/feed experience with behavioral capture as the hidden engine. Prove the loop is worth returning to before anything else exists. V2 — the living world. Bring the evolving world online — a place that visibly changes in response to the player. This is our riskiest, most important design bet: making long-term real-life input read as real growth. AR + camera capture. Design the camera as a first-class entry point into the world, and weave AR moments into the behavior journey so real-world capture feels like play, not a chore. The whole journey. Across all of the above, hold the seams together so functions feel like one world — never a stack of features stitched at the edges. Must-haves You can prototype core gameplay in Unreal Engine Blueprints — end-to-end, a playable MVP of a mechanic, on your own. (Or: demonstrable equivalent in another engine, proven by hands-on work and a portfolio, not by claims.) Real gameplay instinct. You know the difference between a loop that sounds clever and a loop that's actually fun — and you can articulate why one works and the other dies. Experience/systems design judgment. You string mechanics, narrative, UI, and feedback into one seamless whole and instinctively catch anything that breaks immersion or kills the moment. Shipped or led as a primary contributor. We evaluate on real project experience where you were a core creative/technical driver — not a bystander on a large team. Strong pluses AR experience (ARKit / ARCore or in-engine AR pipelines). Comfort designing around AI-driven, behavior-adaptive systems. Interest in behavioral psychology, habit formation, or how environment design (not persuasion) shapes what people actually do. Bilingual (English / Chinese) — our team works across Hong Kong and Vancouver. How we hire for this This is a rare, composite skill, so our process is deliberate: A deep working conversation — we talk through your design reasoning, not just your resume. Portfolio review as a primary contributor — we look closely at projects where the fun (or the fix) was clearly yours. A hands-on prototype exercise — a small in-engine build so we can see how you think in motion. Two filters we're explicit about: we screen out pure conceptual artists who can't build, and we screen out competent builders with no instinct for what makes an experience come alive. We're hiring for the overlap. Engagement Contract-to-hire. We start on contract, and convert to a permanent founding-team role by mutual fit. Hong Kong preferred (we have an entity and a strong bilingual talent pool there); strong remote candidates in compatible time zones considered. Founding-level scope and influence over a product still early enough for your design decisions to define it. To apply: send your portfolio (highlight the pieces where the core experience was yours) and a short note on a game loop you think is quietly brilliant — and why.