Working at Colonist - Join The Online Guild

Colonist is a web based board game that positions itself as an alternative to the highly popular Settlers of Catan board game. We recently interviewed Demi Yilmaz, the co-founder of Colonist, asking him about the team behind the popular game and how it feels to be part of their team.

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Tell us a bit about Colonist. What do you do?

Colonist.io is a brilliant and challenging web based board game that positions itself as an alternative to the highly popular Settlers of Catan board game. You take on the role of a colonist and you must build a civilization and expand your territory. Building settlements increases your production and victory points, but it makes you a target for other players. Extremely simple rules with tremendously deep gameplay. Combine strategy, planning, and cunning negotiations to win. Base game is 4 players. The first player to reach 10 points wins. Can be played solo versus bots, with friends or with online players all over the world.

What has been your biggest achievement over the last year?

We’ve done a couple things. First off we launched a bunch of expansions which were the most requested features in our suggestions board: https://colonist.featureupvote.com/. Another thing we did is revamp the UI. It used to look very old school but now it looks much more modern.

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What tech stack are you using?

For frontend we use PIXI.js for canvas related code. EJS, SCSS & Typescript for the rest of the website. For the backend we use Node.js, Express, Typescript, Typeorm, Redis, Digital Ocean. Other than that we use docker, ansible, webpack and many other smaller tech.

What is the tech team currently working on?

We recently finished matchmaking which was a prerequisite to ranked games. Over the next 2 months we plan on launching a ranked games feature.

How would you describe Colonist’s culture?

Fun. We’re all having fun. Everyone should be enjoying what they’re doing.

What are your remote work policies? What strategies do you use to maintain everyone engaged?

I see us as a modern day gaming guild whose objective is to build games. We all come from a gaming background, we’ve played various MMOs and other online games. We were part of online Clans, Guilds, Alliances. We’re doing nothing different. We’re now a part of an online Guild called Colonist and each member of the guild has their own responsibilities.

What is the interview process like at Colonist?

Lots of people start out by contributing. Some fix bugs, some build community tools, some design community assets, some playtest etc. Since they’re doing those for fun we can be more confident that when they join the team they will continue having fun.

Other than starting out as contributors we occasionally hire someone who is not. First of all, they should be a gamer, secondly they shouldn’t be a noob. We believe good gamers can be good at many other things. So game rankings matter for us.

Our founders:

Demi -> Semi finalist in World Catan Championships which is top 0.10%

Goku -> Challenger in League of Legends which is 0.010%

And finally, why should someone work at Colonist?

Someone should work here if they don’t want a real job and want to continue being a part of an online Guild levelling up and slaying enemies.

Doesn’t this sound like a dream job? If you’re excited to get playing, apply for Colonist’s open roles now!