Unity Game Designer and Prototyper - Choice-Driven Life Simulator

We are looking for a creative Unity Game Designer and Prototype Developer to help design and build the foundational mechanics for an emotionally immersive, choice-driven life-simulation game. The game is intended for short, highly impactful gameplay sessions set in small, emotionally dense environments rather than massive open worlds. The core experiential loop centers on a character progressing through distinct life stages like infancy, toddlerhood, childhood, adulthood, old-aged, dead. Here, their actions, habits, and psychological tendencies dynamically shape their internal traits and influence future opportunities and cycles. We want a designer who can own the mechanics. Instead of building from a rigid checklist, you will have the creative freedom to design the micro-interactions, object dynamics, and environmental cues that satisfy our macro-level progression goals. THE DESIGN AND PROTOTYPING CHALLENGE For this initial milestone, your goal is to design and prototype a playable Early Life Phase that successfully proves several key systems: First, you will design an Organic Discovery System. This involves defining how a player explores and learns the boundaries of a highly restricted initial environment, such as an early childhood setting, using immediate visual and audio feedback rather than text-heavy tutorials or lectures. The player playing the game through an avatar of a child should become familiar with the objects in the avatar's room, not by force, but due to interest of exploring items. Also, the player should learn about house customs, societal expectations etc. through the parents of the avatar. Slowly, the player should develop a feeling of love (or in some cases might be hatred) towards mother and father of the avatar. The player should develop attachment to items and people in the avatar world. This might happen by playing detailed interactive sessions in the game, but as the game is not just about a single life-stage, some time-compression mechanism should be in-place which signals that the avatar has moved to adulthood. It should not look like a break; it should feel continuous and normal. Second, you will establish a Hidden Tendency Tracking system. This should be a data-driven framework, utilizing ScriptableObjects or a similar decoupled architecture, that tracks player behavioral patterns under the hood. The UI must remain clean and immersive, meaning player traits and relationship growth should be felt through world feedback rather than clunky visual meters. Third, you will design the Caregiver and Environment AI. This involves creating simple but emotionally responsive NPC behaviors for primary guardians who react dynamically to player curiosity, comfort-seeking, or boundary-testing actions. Fourth, you will formulate the Natural Progression Loop. This requires designing the logic for how these accumulated hidden variables organically trigger a transition to the next phase of life, laying the structural groundwork for a broader cyclical legacy loop. TECHNICAL EXPECTATIONS The final deliverable must be a functional, self-contained Unity prototype built for PC, but architected with future mobile considerations in mind. The codebase should use highly modular, clean, and extensible C#. The systems you design for this single-room phase must be robust enough for us to easily plug in dozens of completely different life scenarios later. Note that the use of placeholder art and audio is completely fine, as our immediate goal is to validate the core emotional and mechanical loop rather than high-end asset realism. REQUIREMENTS To be successful in this role, you must have proven experience in Unity and C# with a strong portfolio showcasing game design, systems design, or rapid prototyping. You should possess a deep understanding of data-driven Unity architecture, specifically using ScriptableObjects, Prefabs, and Event-driven systems. Additionally, you need the ability to design intuitive UI and UX feedback loops that communicate state changes seamlessly to the player, along with excellent documentation skills to explain how your systems can be scaled up in future development phases.