Art Outsourcing Manager
Description
Founded in 1998, Retro Studios is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nintendo Company, Ltd. Retro is a state-of-the-art game development studio, working in conjunction with Nintendo to bring award-winning games to Nintendo's cutting-edge next-generation platforms. Retro Studios is located in beautiful Austin, Texas. With rolling hills, scenic waterways, abundant wildlife, vibrant music and film scenes, and a laid-back cosmopolitan culture, Austin is a dynamic city with an excellent quality of life. Austin's sunny weather also supports a great range of outdoor activities, providing plenty of venues for top-notch game developers to recharge and unwind.
Essential Duties:
- Principal point of contact between stakeholder departments and art outsourcing vendors.
- Ability to understand and communicate Art Director’s vision and ensure that outsourced art assets maintain that vision.
- Create, manage, and track outsourcing schedules; coordinate with leadership and production to meet deliverable timelines and identify risks.
- Collaborate with stake holders to identify art assets appropriate for outsourcing vendors.
- Generate and coordinate the preparation of documentation, reference art, examples of art asset production, and procedures to achieve the best outcomes from outsourcing vendors.
- Coordinates regular communication with outsourcing vendors and identifies when additional communication is necessary to ensure the sustained quality of deliverables.
- Manages integration and/or able to integrate final outsourced assets into our in-house engine for evaluation.
- Coordinates and provides clear, concise and timely feedback to third party vendors to achieve the goals of the studio.
- Build or enhance art outsourcing vendor relationships, develops testing protocols to art outsourcing vendors and negotiate contracts, scope and objectives for outsourcing vendors.
- Manages approval gates, naming conventions, inspection practices, and may improve general outsourcing practices.
- Collaborates with stakeholders to develop or enhance systems, tools and processes to manage third party vendors and their deliverables.
Knowledge/Experience
Requirements:
- Proven experience in a similar art outsourcing focused role in the games industry.
- An artistic eye for core artistic principles including color, composition, structure and perspective.
- Excellent written and visual communication skills as feedback is generally given visually with written support.
- Experience generating detailed documentation, video reference, and examples of art asset production, procedures, and engine requirements to support the external vendors on a AAA title.
- Highly organized with a strong understanding of scheduling and tracking with asset and project management tools.
- 5+ years of experience as an individual contributor in an art discipline and 3+ years of experience supervising outsourcing for a AAA title.
- Demonstrated technical literacy and experience troubleshooting quality and performance issues.
- Self-motivated with a professional attitude and the ability to take constructive criticism.
Pluses:
- Impressive and relevant portfolio demonstrating art assets created by you in a PBR pipeline, clearly showing game examples of your work.
- Experience managing multiple projects with competing priorities.
- Expert level knowledge of all the various tools used to craft assets for modern PBR game engines.
SUMMARY OF REQUIREMENTS
Undergraduate degree in art related subject is ideal; or completion of an intensive art training program; or equivalent independent study and experience.
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