Combat Game Designer Lisboa

Studio Ellipsis is seeking a Combat Game Designer to help refine and balance the core systems of our third‑person action title. This is a hands‑on, systems‑driven role for someone who thrives on iteration, precision, and feel: Translating high‑level design direction into tuned, deterministic gameplay that rewards mastery.

What You’ll Do

• Implement, tune, and balance combat systems, weapons, abilities, and enemy behaviors.
• Own the feel of combat: responsiveness, hit timing, recovery, rhythm, etc.
• Calibrate interactions between player mechanics, AI logic, and camera to achieve a clean, deterministic combat model.
• Maintain and evolve combat parameters: damage curves, stamina systems, tracking logic, invulnerability frames, and cooldowns.
• Build, document, and maintain data‑driven balance frameworks for Pv
  E and Pv
  P encounters.
• Partner with Animation, Engineering, and AI teams to refine movement fidelity, impact feedback, and rhythm.
• Analyze playtest data and player telemetry to validate tuning, surface edge cases, and evolve the meta.
• Ensure every weapon, archetype, and enemy type has a distinct combat identity and tactical role.

What You Bring

• 5+ years of experience in combat or systems design for 3rd‑person or action titles (Pv
  E and/or Pv
  P).
• Deep understanding of melee and ranged combat design fundamentals — spacing, timing, recovery, and player feedback.
• Proven ability to tune deterministic combat systems for balance and consistency across latency and skill tiers.
• Strong grasp of camera, lock‑on, targeting, and animation‑driven gameplay.
• Experience with combat data management: tuning tables, curves, and debug visualization.
• Fluent in Unreal Engine (Blueprints, Data
  Tables, tuning workflows).
• Analytical mindset — able to diagnose subtle feel issues through metrics and iteration.
• Comfortable working within clear design direction and taking ownership of executional detail.
• Experience designing and implementing gameplay systems in Unreal Engine.
• Shipped at least one game using Unreal Engine.

Bonus

• Experience creating Pv
  Pv
  E or extraction‑based combat ecosystems.
• Knowledge of AI behavior trees, modular encounter systems, or systemic combat scaling.
• Understanding of competitive tuning and meta evolution in skill‑based games.
• Background in combat animation timing, root motion, or motion matching.
• Familiarity with the Lyra Gameplay Ability System (GAS) and its application to multiplayer.

About Studio Ellipsis

Studio Ellipsis is a Lisbon‑based collective of senior developers crafting genre‑defining experiences that fuse precision, mood, and mastery. We believe small, focused teams and elegant systems can create worlds larger than life. If you care deeply about feel, timing, and clarity, and you want to build combat that’s elegant, deep, and endlessly replayable: we want to meet you.