At Hinterland, we strive to create thoughtful places for thoughtful players, therefore we put a high premium on the quality of the visuals in our games. A big part of our ability to deliver industry-leading beauty in our experiences depends on the strength of our Technical Art team, who sit at the intersection of art and engineering. We are always looking to improve the skill level of our team, and to expand the diversity of knowledge and viewpoints that make our experiences unique. To that end, we are looking to add a talented Technical Artist to our development team.
You should have at least 5 years of game production experience as a Technical Artist. We are particularly interested in hearing from candidates who have worked on large scale open world games, or games which pushed the bar for visual quality where you were directly involved with the visual development or optimization efforts. As the studio is comprised of senior developers who enjoy a high degree of autonomy and work at complex cross-disciplinary problem-solving, we place a high premium on people’s ability to communicate effectively, and their willingness to invest time and energy in team communication and collaboration.
Under the guidance of the Technical Art Director, this role will be situated as part of a central team supporting all of our game projects. As such, you will need to be able to work autonomously, balance your priorities, and communicate with the art teams on each project. We run a flexible working environment, and therefore focus on productivity and quality of output versus hours in the chair. This means everyone we hire has to be motivated, professional, and needs the minimum amount of hand-holding, while still being able to work to clear direction and check in regularly for feedback. We have been able to develop The Long Dark and other projects without any crunch, and we’d like to keep it that way, and this depends on having motivated, skilled, professional developers who are willing to contribute to goal-setting, planning, and tracking efforts.
Responsibilities:
- Support content creators with solving technical problems and workflow issues
- Improve inefficiencies in artist workflows through tools and documentation
- Help define art budgets and ensure that art is created to within the specifications
- Profile for performance bottlenecks and propose optimization solutions
- Research and develop new technologies for enhancing visual quality or solving artistic challenges
- Develop and optimize shaders and post processing effects
- Assist in the creation of technically involved content such as procedural models, complex visual effects, and simulations
Requirements:
- Expert on art creation processes for game development
- Proficient at developing tools to support artist workflows in Unity and/or Unreal
- Proficient at developing tools to support art creation in Maya, Motionbuilder, and Photoshop
- Experienced at profiling and debugging for art and rendering related bugs or optimizations
- Familiar with writing shaders in Cg/HLSL or through node based editors
- Excellent problem solving skills and ability to multitask
- Excellent communication skills with the willingness to collaborate with others
- Strong understanding of modeling and lighting principles
ABOUT HINTERLAND
Hinterland is an equal-opportunity employer. The studio is comprised of a multi-national, multi-ethnic team. We value a diversity of backgrounds. We also value veteran experience and a strong work ethic that supports the studio’s culture and values. Our work ethic and production methodology is built around a “Getting Stuff Done” paradigm. We embrace a flexible working environment that affords our team members the opportunity to enjoy family time and exercise self-care. We balance this out with very high expectations about the quality of output from everyone on the team. We offer a variety of perks, but do not believe perks are the same thing as culture.
(Also, everyone who joins our team gets a pair of slippers. They are nice slippers.)