About Us

We're nerds from MIT.
Gaming is our obsession.
Perfection is our objective.

Lunarch Studios was conceived in 2010, when our designers—a fiercely competitive team of math olympiad champions, professional poker players, and MIT PhD students—set out on a journey to advance the art of online games through aggressive innovation.

Dissatisfied with the shallow and exploitative trends dominating the industry, we aim to develop cutting-edge, intelligent games that use technology to create novel experiences of unexpected depth. Our products are ambitious, one-of-a-kind titles that define new genres and innovate in multiple directions at once.

As a company, Lunarch aims to blend the skill and determination of a tech startup with the integrity and craftsmanship of an independent game studio. We're committed to building disruptive, elegant, and bullshit-free online games, and we're driven by raw, unflinching perfectionism.

Lunarch Games Are Different.

Compulsively made.

Lunarch was born when three of our founders left their doctoral studies at MIT to grow Prismata from a tiny hobby project into an award-winning online game with over a million owners. Our decision was driven by one thing: if we didn't develop Prismata, the game wouldn't exist. Lunarch games are created under a sole motivation: our collective desire to see them in the world. Not making them simply isn't an option for us.

Designed for Depth.

We transcend "easy to learn, yet difficult to master", a deceptive tagline espoused by many games in which mastery ultimately becomes a grind of calculation, memorization, or dexterity. Instead, we heighten the skill ceiling by maximizing the richness of the emergent interactions spawning from simple game mechanics. Our games are a joy to master—a neverending rush of eureka moments as players uncover endless layers of complexity.

Boldly Innovative.

Game design advances surprisingly slowly. Case in point: CCG, RTS, and tactics games all rely on the same basic 25-year-old formulas. At Lunarch, we ignore formulas in favour of an analytical first-principles approach: we define metrics—elegance, novelty, intuitiveness, simplicity, skill ceiling—and search for rules and parameters that maximize them. The end result feels perfectly crafted and refreshingly fun to play.

Maximally Impactful.

Lunarch operates in an ideal mid-budget space: we’re sufficiently well-funded to hire the best people and do high-quality work, but we’re not constrained by the AAA need to stick with low-risk designs for mass-market audiences. We take on ambitious projects that aim to make meaningful advances to the state of the art and serve as examples for the entire industry. Every person on our team can have a massive impact.

Meet The Team.

Elyot Grant
CEO and Game Director
    elyot [@] lunarchstudios.com
A man of three math degrees and many talents, Elyot won gold medals in national programming and math competitions, was 29th globally at the 2019 World Puzzle Championship, and held world records in StarCraft, Tetris: The Grandmaster, and several other games. He also received the Computing Research Association's most prestigious research award in North America. An obsessive gamedev hobbyist since 1999, Elyot founded Lunarch to pursue his passion full-time. He hasn't looked back since.
David Rhee
Game Engineer
    david [@] lunarchstudios.com
David spent his childhood imprisoned in math camps, where he was forced to speed-solve Rubik's cubes while blindfolded. His intense training led to victory in the Canadian Math Olympiad in 2006. Since then, he's learned to dissipate excess brainpower by making awesome indie games and exhibiting world record performances in Katamari. At Lunarch, David is a wizard of procedural graphics, an architect of custom game engines, and a destroyer of unimaginably hard systems problems.
Alexey Kozhevnikov
Game Engineer
    akz [@] lunarchstudios.com
A true badass, Alexey is (so far) the only cool person at Lunarch. He's what happens when an unmovable object is met by an unstoppable force. Alexey has travelled the world, hiked up Mount Fuji, plays the drums, has a black belt in karate, and can probably bench press the rest of the team. After surviving Waterloo Computer Science's notorious killer courses, Alexey joined Lunarch, where he's an unrelenting beast of gameplay programming and multiplayer netcode.
Alyssa Carey
Worldbuilding Lead
    alyssa [@] lunarchstudios.com
Alyssa got her start at an ivy league neuroscience lab, where she developed novel algorithms to interpret terabytes of electrophysiological recording data. In other words, Alyssa can statistically decode our thoughts. A veteran of both the arts and sciences, Alyssa's accomplishments include successfully performing brain surgery, building imaging devices used by cardiologists, and living a secret double life as a creator of fantasy worlds. At Lunarch, Alyssa heads writing, concept art, and narrative design.
Alex Wice
Game Engineer
    alex [@] lunarchstudios.com
Brilliant and audacious, Alex grinded for years to master every popular poker format and subsequently shattered online poker records by playing 50 tables at once for much of 40 straight hours. His domination of Project Euler led to personal calls from Google headhunters, and his ridiculous Leetcode performance earned him a top 5 rating and over 20 first place finishes.
Prof. Will Ma
Academic Fellow, Game Design
    will [@] lunarchstudios.com
A multi-talented renaissance man, Will became a skilled poker player in high school, profiting over a million dollars in a few years. Will's parents, believing gambling to bring bad luck, forced him to become a PhD student at MIT, where he secretly taught a poker class. After taking a two-year PhD sabbatical to co-found Lunarch, Will become a Professor at Columbia University, where he studies the mathematics behind algorithmic pricing, mechanism design, and supply chain optimization.
Prof. Dave Churchill
Academic Fellow, AI
    dave.churchill [@] lunarchstudios.com
Settling for only the best, Lunarch Studios found Dave, who single-handedly developed UAlbertabot, which won the 2013 StarCraft AI Competition, defeating all other teams' entries. Known to spend more time playing RTS and MMO games than sleeping, Dave's love of living in fantasy worlds led him to a career in academic game AI research, where he dreams of someday writing a bot that can defeat Korean StarCraft professionals.

Products

Project Sophia (AKA Project S)

Our third title, which aims to bring large-scale multiplayer gameplay to the 3D puzzle genre (Portal, The Witness, Zelda, etc.). Published by our friends at Behaviour Interactive.
Want to help us make this game? We're hiring!

Prismata

An award-winning strategy game. Described as a "new genre" by PC Gamer, it combines elements of RTS, deckbuilders, and board games. Try it for free!

Jelly Is Sticky

A clever puzzle game by David Rhee and Elyot Grant. Manipulate surprising contraptions made from sticky, deformable jelly blocks. Awarded a puzzle design grant from Jonathan Blow.

Careers

We're hiring!
All positions are remote.
International applicants are welcome.

Want to work at a quality-first game developer with a tech startup feel? Lunarch is seeking several new hires for our next title ("Project Sophia"—a multiplayer first-person puzzle game incorporating elements of MMOs and open-world action-adventure games, built in Unreal Engine for PC and consoles). We offer competitive compensation and a friendly, casual work environment.

Check out our summary of all openings, or the positions below:

• UX Designer


• Environment Artist


• Open World Level Designer


• QA Analyst or QA Engineer


• Puzzle Designer


• Co-op Student, Intern, or New Grad


Lunarch has been operating remotely since 2016 and all positions will continue to be remote for the foreseeable future. Applicants from all countries are welcome to apply.

careers [@] lunarchstudios.com

Contact Lunarch Studios

Get in touch with us.

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