Combat Director

About Level Up Games

Level Up Games, LLC is the game development studio behind Kyzen. Level Up Games is a well funded, fast-paced indie studio nearly 4 years into development on Kyzen, a kid-focused dynamic open world survival crafting game that combines the best of Minecraft and Palworld with the playful energy of a Shonen anime. 

Role Overview

We are hiring an experienced Combat Director on a temporary, full-time basis to lead a focused combat overhaul on Kyzen over an approximately three to four month term (longer if the work can be justified) beginning in October or November 2026.

Put simply, our fights are fine, but they’re not fun enough yet. Encounters lack the readability, simplicity, variety, and the opportunity for mastery that make combat worth engaging with for anyone - especially kids. You will diagnose why, define a coherent attack-type framework for the game, and give every mob in the roster a distinct, readable attack pattern that over-indexes on fun. 

This is a senior, hands-on role. At Level Up Games, everyone is a doer. While there is a small team to manage, the core of the role will be actual combat design work. You will set direction, produce combat encounters from start to finish by yourself, and partner closely with our engineering team to establish a combat style that is cohesive, fun, and worthy of mastering. 

You will be expected to work with AI in any way that helps advance the project and delight players. If you’re philosophically opposed to AI, this is not the right opportunity for you. We believe AI is a powerful tool that in the right hands can radically accelerate human creativity.

Key Responsibilities

Combat Diagnosis, Direction, and Execution

• Audit Kyzen's current combat and deliver a clear, prioritized diagnosis of why encounters are not yet fun enough — covering readability, feedback, pacing, risk and reward, simplicity, and player agency.
• Establish the combat design pillars for the title and the standards every encounter will be held to.
• Prioritize the fix list against a three to four month window, being explicit about what is in scope and what is not.
• Living in UE5’s animation systems: Anim Montages, Anim Notifies (hit frames, cancel windows, VFX/SFX triggers), Blend Spaces, Animation Blueprints, root motion tuning
• Retiming/trimming clips, adjusting play rates, splitting animations into startup/active/recovery, adding hit-stop and camera shake
• Prototyping attacks with placeholder animations and defining the spec our animators with then polish
• Own the “feel” — hitboxes, input buffering, cancel timing, enemy telegraphs, etc.

Attack Type Framework

• Define the game's taxonomy of attack types — the distinct categories of threat the player must learn to read and counter.