Art Director or Lead Artist

Description

Art Director or Lead Artist

Full Time or Contract
Remote

Lunarch is seeking a talented and experienced candidate to lead the art efforts for our third title (a multiplayer puzzle game for PC and consoles developed in Unreal Engine).

This is an extremely challenging project (with 100-person multiplayer and dozens of 2D and 3D puzzle types) aiming for high-end, distinctive, beloved visuals on an indie budget. Accordingly, we’re looking for a highly intelligent, creative, and passionate visionary to lead our visual design efforts.

Key Responsibilities

Define and communicate the visual design, style, and artistic pillars for our game.
Collaborate with other artists and multiple outsourced art teams to make this vision a reality.
Iterate on the designs and concepts to support the overall goals of the game.
Create style guides, reference materials, and bibles for the characters, environment, lighting, and vfx.
Help to develop and lead the art pipeline such that feedback and reviews happen in a timely and productive manner.
Be an integral part of the studio's culture of collaboration and openness.
Work directly in Unreal Engine and other tools as needed to polish and refine the visual experience of our game.

Requirements

A solid background in Unreal Engine (ideally at least 2 years experience)
At least one shipped title, ideally in the space of high-fidelity 3D PC and console games. More = better, but quality over quantity. Bonus points if you’ve worked on AAA first person titles, open world games, or puzzle games.
An understanding of how to bring a vision to life across all the artistic facets of a game (ideally through a personal or professional project that demonstrates this)
Skills in both character and environment design
Ability to communicate and provide guidance on how to achieve the artistic vision through reviews, documentation, sketches and more
Ability to prioritize for the art team's task-planning
While Art Director experience isn't required, you should be highly collaborative
A strong sense of self-management and proactiveness

Expertise in some of the following would be an asset (though you're not expected to be a pro at everything!)

Modeling 3d assets (such as setpieces and character cosmetics)
Painting textures and creating UE4 materials
3D animation
Technical art, including hair/cloth simulation and particle system VFX (cascade or niagara)
UI design (layouts, typesetting, motion graphics, and iconography)
Creating in-engine prototype scenes with placeholder assets
Making in-engine cinematic sequences
Lighting and post-processing in UE4

Salary: USD 55k-110k/yr depending on experience

About Lunarch Studios:

Lunarch is a small (<10 people, but growing significantly in 2021) Canadian game developer founded in 2013 by a group of math olympiad champions, professional poker players, and MIT PhD students. We develop cutting-edge, intelligent games that leverage technology to create novel and deep experiences for smart players. Our products are ambitious, one-of-a-kind titles that define new genres and innovate in multiple directions at once. Their creation demands exceptional intelligence, creativity, and hard work.

We're the developers behind Prismata—a multiplayer strategy game that blends elements of RTS, deckbuilders, and board games. Our upcoming title (“Project Sophia”) is similarly innovative and aims to bring large-scale multiplayer gameplay to the 3D puzzle genre (Portal, The Witness, Zelda, etc.).

Lunarch is more like a tech startup than a traditional game studio. We're in a competitive space that rewards quickness and demands high-quality work that meets all requirements on the first try. Ideal candidates are exceptionally intelligent, knowledgeable about games, and highly productive. We love people who have excelled in competitions (math/programming contests, puzzlehunts, science fairs, infosec CTF, competitive gaming, poker, etc.), people with heroic academic accomplishments (awards, publications, etc.), or people with proven track records or killer portfolios (shipped games or jaw-dropping work in art/animation/audio/UI/design/etc.).

The benefits of Lunarch include an excellent work culture, fully remote environment, and good compensation (aiming to be competitive with AAA studios and tech startups), but most importantly, you’ll contribute to ambitious titles that aim to make meaningful advances to the state of the art. We operate in an ideal mid-budget space: we’re sufficiently well-funded to hire the best people, do high-quality work, and promote our titles widely, but we’re not constrained by the AAA need to stick with low-risk designs for mass-market audiences. You will make an impact here.

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