Gameplay Programmer

Job Description: Gameplay Programmer (Fixed Term Contract) 

Department: Programming  

Reporting to: Technical Director  

The Studio  

Compulsion Games is a first-party game studio and subsidiary of Microsoft’s Xbox Game Studios, located in Montreal, Canada.   

Founded by industry veterans, we have a human-first culture where we trust and respect each other, with shared love and passion for our craft. Our games have won praise and awards for their art, music, world-building, and engaging narratives. We are devoted to building experiences that feel unique and handcrafted, and our programming team is here to make sure our content creators and designers are as creative as they can be.  

We aim to create characters with compelling, human flaws and narratives that explore heavy themes with care and empathy. Our storytelling typically has a healthy dose of darkness and comedy thrown in for good measure.  

Our Culture  

Compulsion Games is a quality-led studio with a humble team that enjoys experimenting with an artistic approach to making games. We like to hire people who are drawn to our core values of trust, autonomy, harmony and craftsmanship and share our vision of a studio built around them. As a team, we do not want to grow too big to stay true to these values, as they don’t scale well.  

A core part of our hiring process is ensuring new hires are well-aligned in order to build a harmonious team and company. We care deeply about our team and their wellbeing, so you’d be joining a close-knit group who are creative, inclusive and cares about developing one another.   

The Need  

We’re looking to add a talented Gameplay Programmer to our human-sized programming community, to help develop gameplay systems and ingredients while being an active and important member of our multidisciplinary feature teams, and as such, should be comfortable communicating and working with a wide variety of disciplines. We need a programmer who is eager to contribute to the overall gameplay experience of our players.  

The Role  

We would like someone not afraid to communicate and work directly with art, animation, realization and design teams to develop gameplay features and systems such as player interaction, character behaviours, game elements, 3C, AI or game progression. The role will also involve working on the proof of concepts for technical improvements, debugging and polishing various developed features.   

We need you to have tangible experience in the games industry, preferably working with PC and/or Console Games, but other relevant experiences will be taken into consideration. With this exposure, we expect you to understand the fundamental principles of working in teams as well as the life cycle of a successful project and how to adapt yourself to each phase. True to our core values of trust and autonomy, we will empower you and your team to decide what needs to be done and how to get there. Your lead and the other programmers will be there to support and advise you in this endeavour.  

Specific Role Requirements:  

• Experience working in Games and other applicable experience. We will respect your hard learned skills and will try our best to make sure you can use your strengths daily. We will adjust the title to your seniority.  

• We value people with a deep knowledge in a specific domain just as well as people with a breadth of knowledge and able to help on many fronts.  

• Experience with Unreal Engine is preferable; showing that you have mastered at least one engine is mandatory. You should be a skilled and confident programmer using C++.  

• We hope you are someone who plays games regularly and understands the fundamentals that make Gameplay ‘feel’ good.   

• A desire to learn regardless of your level of seniority and share your expertise with others  

• Excellent communication skills to collaborate effectively with a diverse group of artists, designers, and animators. It is a particularly important part of the job, as decisions are often made organically in our studio  

• We expect high levels of autonomy and proactivity, as it would help you to thrive in our work culture.  

Please note that this is a Fixed-Term Contractor position, for 12 months initially, with the possibility of extension. Whilst we operate a hybrid work environment, our preference is to hire applicants who can spend time in the studio regularly; therefore, we will prioritise applicants local to Montreal and/or within Quebec province.  

Our downtown Montreal location, conveniently situated by the Atwater Metro station, operates on a hybrid setup for employees based in or willing to relocate to the Montreal area.   

If you’re eager to contribute to a team that’s redefining storytelling in games, we’d love to hear from you.