Media Molecule is looking for an incredible UI designer to help us make more amazing games!

This is a senior role, working across different projects on different platforms you will be responsible for promoting a human centred design approach throughout all aspects of Media Molecule’s prodigious output. Although primarily focussed on game UI, expect to get involved in all aspects of the creative process from pitching through to tools development and games design.

As a passionate but pragmatic advocate of all things UX you will be able to suggest and deliver solutions that will make our games better. This will involve being thoughtful, flexible and able to collaborate in a small, tightly knit and ambitious team. You are an engaging talker, designer and presenter who will be able to nurture the fleck of an idea, getting buy in from your peers and then developing it into something that might just revolutionise the world of games.

“What I think an IT person looks like”, by Lila aged 10

On Friday 8th March 2013 (International Women’s Day), three very excited ladies from Media Molecule attended the Little Miss Geek ICT School Takeover Event held at Queen Elizabeth’s Girls’ School and St. Saviour’s & St. Olave’s in London. The purpose of the day was to inspire and provide an insight to girls in year seven about what it’s like to work in technology.

But what is Little Miss Geek I hear you shout?

Little Miss Geek is a non-profit, social arm of Lady Geek founded by Belinda Parmar.

“The aim is to do for the tech industry what Jamie Oliver did for school dinners; to cause a nationwide change from the ground up.”

The problem we have is that the technology industry is suffering from a gender imbalance at the moment and the numbers of women involved are declining every year.

At Media Molecule 22% of the workforce is female, 12% of which work hands-on with the games it makes which is actually a higher number than other development studios have. Little Miss Geek has provided some scary but true facts about the technology industry:

“Women only make up 17% of the UK’s tech workforce and this has been falling by 0.5% each year = we need to encourage more women to want to work in the tech industry.

There was only 1 girl for every 11 boys in the average UK A-Level computing class in 2011. Girls account for 56% of high education applicants but only make up 14% of Computer Science and I.T. subjects = we need to excite girls to want to study computing, so they are more knowledgeable about tech.”

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At Media Molecule, we’re hard at work bringing the papery world of Tearaway into people’s homes, not only on the PlayStation Vita, but also through papercraft! As you explore the game world, you will unlock a treasure trove of different papercraft plans for you to print and build. We’re looking for someone to join us for six months, and help us bring the papercraft world in to the real world, ensuring that our papercraft is just as fun for players to make, as the game is to play.

Who are you?

As a Wizard of Papercraft, you will naturally be a lover of all things Paper. There’s nothing you enjoy more than spending the day with your head buried in a box of card and paper scraps, or cutting, folding, and gluing a sheet of plain A4 paper into anything you can think of; from a paper plane, to a pop-up fire breathing T-Rex, which wags its tail when you pull its little finger.

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In the latest episode of GT.TV, Geoff Keighley talks to our resident bearded doodler Rex about a previously unseen area of Sogport - The Lab.

The Lab is an area which explores the physicality of music and paper, and all the platformy fun those things can provide. I’ll let Rex explain, check it out below (skip past Spock to the 15m mark)

P.S It’s okay to admit it was that edgy, suggestive headline that brought you here, you naughty people.

On Wednesday we had the exciting opportunity to put Alex up on stage at the Playstation 4 event, to show you what our second team has been fiddling about with for the last while. If you missed it then be sure to check out the live stream of the event, or just watch our part below…

We’re very excited about the work we’re doing, and we can’t wait to be able to talk about the actual project, let alone for people to get their hands on it and start recording & sharing their dreams!

We had a lot of fun pulling together our R&D presentation, and so I thought it would be fun to share some of the behind the scenes moments which show just how we put this all together. We’ll be sharing more of these with you in the coming weeks, there were some very funny moments!

Come and work for us!

ALSO, we are missing some vital Molecules here at Mm, people we need to help us advance our new experiment. If what you have seen turns you on, then please get in touch!  See our jobs page for more details.

We’re sure everyone has a load questions for us, and we’ll really enjoy revealing more about our dream for you throughout this year :)

Lots of love,
Siobhan, Mark, Alex, Dave, Kareem and everyone else at Mm :)

We’re a bit sleepy today, because we stayed up all night umming, ahhing and generally struggling to pick winners to our wendigo mask contest. Finally, after an intense session balancing the merits of each entry, we’ve settled on some winners.

The only way we could settle on those winners though, was to double the number of them from three to six, and make sure we had a good spread of incredible mask creations, and our favourite photographic scenes.

Before we get to naming the winners though, we’d like to thank everyone who entered: Thank you guys, we loved your masks, and we’ve printed them out to put on the wall!
As a little thank you for helping us decorate, we will send an A3 professionally printed tearaway papercraft elk plan to everyone who entered, and we might even get Rex to sign them.

NOW. The Winners. Each of these winners will receive a signed framed doodle by Rex.

Winner: @Lilliflora

Winner: @mabxtery

Winner: @doseiengine

Winner: @Imputed714

Winner: @sybanee

Winner: @childp_child

Honourable Mention

Not a winner per se, but the first ever Tearaway Cosplay by @stuffstuffthing cannot go unnoticed! We’ll send you a small cool thing, once we can work out what that might be!

We will contact everyone, starting with the winners, via Twitter DMS. So make sure you’re following @tearawaygame if you want to hear from us!
If you haven’t heard from us in 7 days, then get in touch.

Look at all the amazing entries below, and thank you everyone who entered, you are all awesome. Another creative challenge awaits….

So listen right, don’t tell anyone, but we’ve got a contest going on right now, and you could win big time just for glueing some paper together!

You might not have heard about it, because we were busy on a whirlwind press tour, sorry about that, but now we’re back we’re ready for some crafting!

So - Make a wendigo mask from our template, take a photo, and you could win some original, signed, framed artwork from the one and only Rex Crowle. It could look something like this, but a million times better, because this was just a really, really old drawing I found on Rex’s desk.

How do you win this thing then? It’s really very simple.

1. Make a wendigo mask
2. Send us a photo
3. Win the contest

Like this…

The full rules are below, but that sums it up.

Oh before you go, we wanted to clarify two things that weren’t in the original contest post

1. You should make your Wendigo as unique as you can, give it some personality, stick those eyes on wonky, use those yellow strips as teeth or hair or whatever.


2. You can stick other bits of paper onto the mask you like, you don’t need to just use the stuff provided! 

Here are some examples of what we mean…

These ones were made by Games Journalists, and if they can do it, you certainly can.



OK, now let’s get sticking, there’s only a week left to enter!

OFFICIAL CONTEST RULES

Our favourite three photos will win a framed, signed, doodle by Tearaway lead designer and art master - Rex Crowle.
We’ll be judging on both the awesomeness of the mask, but also of the photo itself, so no artistic ability required here folk, just cutting and sticking and growling.
To enter the contest, do this:

• Download the plans for the mask - make it and customise it
• Pose in some kind of awesome photograph
• Follow @tearawaygame on Twitter
• Tweet your photo @tearawaygame along with the hashtag #tearawaywendigo

The contest ends on Feb 11th at 9:00am GMT
We’ll DM you shortly after that date if you are one of the winners!

It’s been a little while since we updated you on our progress making Tearaway, but that all changes today! We recently showed some new parts of the game to members of the gaming press, and their previews and coverage of that should start appearing today across the web. We introduced them to an area of the game we’ve been working on for quite some time, and today we’d like you to see it too!

Just one of the stops you’ll make as you go on your delivery adventure in the world of Tearaway is Sogport, a mysterious island marooned in a deep sea of glue, and inhabited by some very fishy folk with a fearful obsession with the island’s monstrous local wildlife.  See for yourself….

We’re also really excited to introduce you to atoi (pronounced like the French phrase; “ah-twa” )

When you start your adventure, you’ll be able to customise the game to your liking, choosing which messenger will accompany you on your journey, either iota or atoi, and also on the shape, size and colour of your god-like fingers.
Look out for previews of Tearaway on the internets today, they should hold some more interesting surprises.

We’ll leave you with one more thing - a creative challenge!
We’ve put together the plans for you to make your own Wendigo mask, and what’s more, we’re running a contest - say whaaaaaat? Check out this blog post for info on to make your own mask, and enter the contest. Do it now!

When we announced Tearaway, we also gave out the plans to make a papercraft Elk for people to make, and were mightily impressed with the results! Since then, we’ve been really eager to get some more creative challenges out there.

This challenge is a bit different but still involves cutting and sticking, and if anything, is a lot easier! We’ve created plans that will let you make your own, fully customisable mask of a Wendigo, the monstrous beasts from the island of Sogport. We hereby challenge thee to make yourself a Wendigo mask, and send us pictures of you in the mask, terrorising your family* or generally marauding about the place, RAghr!

Our favourite three photos will win a framed, signed, doodle by Tearaway lead designer and art master - Rex Crowle.
We’ll be judging on both the awesomeness of the mask, but also of the photo itself, so no artistic ability required here folk, just cutting and sticking and growling.
To enter the contest, do this:

• Download the plans for the mask - make it and customise it
• Pose in some kind of awesome photograph
• Follow @tearawaygame on Twitter
• Tweet your photo @tearawaygame along with the hashtag #tearawaywendigo

The contest ends on Feb 11th at 9:00am GMT
We’ll DM you shortly after that date if you are one of the winners!
*pretend terrorising people, pretend.

We’re nearly done with 2012, and the festive season is upon us. But before we all hang up our socks for Santa and take a break for a few weeks, we wanted to wish all of you a very merry Christmas!

It’s not much, but we’ve got you all a little Christmas pressie, ooh excite! To give you all a little creative challenge, perfect for the holidays, we’ve given the Tearaway Papercraft Elk a little festive makeover! Once made, we think it makes for a rather unique Christmas ornament, take a look…

So grab your scissors and glue, and build yourself a Tearaway Reindeer to add some Christmas sparkle to your home -  the pattern is here. If you do happen to make one, please send us a picture to our twitter account - @mediamolecule -  or post them in the comments below, so we can collect them all for a nice festive gallery.

Thank you all for your continued support of us and our games, and for the constant friendly smiles. It’s been a fairly quiet year from us this year, but next year you’ll be hearing a lot more from us, oh yes!

Merry Christmas you lot,

Love and kisses, Mm xxx

Download the Tearaway Papercraft Reindeer.