We’re Failbetter Games, makers of Sunless Skies, Sunless Sea and Fallen London. We’re known for inventive narrative design and rich, atmospheric storytelling.

We’re looking for a part-time Junior Editor for our game Fallen London, working around 21 hours a week with flexible scheduling – we can adjust the exact number of hours based on your needs, so long as it falls in the same vicinity.

Duties of this role include:

Editing written work for typos, clarity, and style
Play-testing Fallen London stories
Resolving reported bugs in Fallen London content
Responding to player support requests

This is an entry-level position and does not require prior work experience in the game industry, though it will require some existing familiarity as a player with Fallen London. As a flexible part-time position, we anticipate it may be particularly suitable for someone with other commitments such as part-time education, voluntary work, or family care responsibilities.

What an Editor Does Here

Proofreading and corrections. Every month, we release several new stories for Fallen London, written by our in-house writing team or by external freelancers.

The editor proofreads the draft content for typos, grammatical errors, violations of our style guide, and any text that feels clunky or confusing. They’re also encouraged to flag departures from established lore, places where the text might read as supporting harmful stereotypes or prejudices, or other more subjective issues.

The editor also playtests new stories and reports any bugs they encounter that disrupt the flow of the story.

Player support. The editor’s second major duty is to help provide player support. This person reviews support tickets received from players, diagnoses and resolves problems, records feedback for later review by the whole team, and answers player emails. This sometimes requires a bit of mystery-solving to dive into the game content and discover what exactly has gone wrong.

Other members of the writing team also share in support, editing, and playtesting tasks. Our new editor will add to our capacity, but will not be on their own.

What We Can Offer

Failbetter is committed to offering employees a safe, respectful environment, a healthy work-life balance, and transparent decision-making. We make our games without crunch and enthusiastically eliminate systemic sources of overtime. We don’t talk over one another in meetings, and we don’t expect all our employees to share the same hobbies and cultural referents. We have won GameIndustry.biz’s Best Places to Work award multiple times, most recently in 2021.

Our junior editor will be joining a very experienced and highly collegial writing team. We listen seriously to input from junior members of the team; we also love to share our knowledge and we do our best to help one another grow professionally.

Further benefits of working here include:

Employer pension contributions
20 days of paid annual holiday allowance (pro rata, so the amount will be slightly different if you work more or less than 21 hours a week)
Free games from our friends in the industry
Optional multiplayer gaming and lunch-time virtual hangouts
Remote work
Flexible hours

In terms of hours, we will need our editor to

overlap with the rest of the team’s core hours (M-Th, 11 AM to 4 PM) for at least a few hours a week, to enable team communication
keep on top of support tickets without gaps of more than two days: doing all the work on Mondays and Tuesdays and then being absent for the rest of the week would not be a good fit, for instance

Within those limits, we can be very flexible about exactly when you’re working. If you have specific questions about what might work for you, please feel free to get in touch with us.

Pay will be prorated against a £27,000 full time salary, which comes to £16,200 for someone working 21 hours a week.

Our studio has worked entirely remotely since the start of the pandemic, and we have no current plans to resume office work in the future. Our editor will be welcome to work from anywhere in the UK. (For this particular position, we will unfortunately not be able to sponsor a visa or work with someone based overseas, for administrative reasons.)

Requirements (and Non-Essential Extras)

You don’t need a particular degree, or an arbitrary number of years’ experience or shipped titles to work for us. As long as you’re able to do the job well and can demonstrate that in your application, we’d love to hear from you.

We need you to have:

Familiarity with Fallen London
Comfort using Slack, Zoom, Google docs, and spreadsheets
Willingness to be trained in the tools we use to build interactive narrative
Good written English, and the ability to edit prose to conform to a UK style guide
UK residency and a right to work here

If you have a life experience or perspective that is not typically represented in video games, please feel free to tell us about that in your application as well. We are always eager to bring new perspectives into our writing team.

How to apply

The role you’re applying for, in the subject line of your email.
A cover letter in the body of your email. Please use this to let us know what makes you a good fit for the position and why it interests you.
A summary of any relevant experience, be it in work, education or volunteering. This can be a CV, but you're welcome to just append a less formal summary to your cover letter if that would be more convenient.

Also, if you’re unsure whether to apply, we’ll be happy to answer questions – please email us at the above address.