Jobs in Niagara Falls, United States

compulsiongames.com

Job Description : Technical Artist (6 Months FTC)

Department : Art

Reporting to: Art director and Tech director

~ The Studio

Compulsion Games is a first-party game studio and subsidiary of Microsoft’s Xbox Game Studios, located in Montreal, Canada.

Founded by industry veterans, we have a human-first culture where we trust and respect each other, with shared love and passion for our craft. Our games have won praise for their art, music, world-building and engaging narratives. We are devoted to building experiences that feel unique and handcrafted and our programming team is here to ensure our content creators and designers are as creative as they can be. We aim to create characters with compelling, human flaws and narratives that explore heavy themes with care and empathy. Our storytelling typically has a healthy dose of darkness and comedy thrown in for good measure.

~ Our Culture

Compulsion Games is a quality-led studio with a humble team that enjoys experimenting with an artistic approach to making games. We like to hire people who are drawn to our core values of trust, autonomy, harmony and craftsmanship and share our vision of a studio built around them. As a team, we do not want to grow too big in order to stay true to these values as they don’t scale well.

Our team is passionately committed to both diversity and accessibility, a core value throughout the Xbox Game Studios group. Therefore, a core part of our hiring process is ensuring new hires are well-aligned in order to build a harmonious team and company. We care deeply about our team and their wellbeing, so you’d be joining a close-knit group who are creative, inclusive and care about developing one another.

~ The Need

We’re looking to add a talented technical artist to our human-sized tech art community, to support and participate in various technical and art activities that will benefit the rest of the studio as well as our players.

~ The Role

We expect you to be passionate about solving technical and artistic problems, always trying to understand how things actually work under the hood and applying these learnings to the different challenges you and your team will face on a regular basis. This does include optimization, memory management but also being there for our different art teams (Environment, characters, VFX, lighting…) by giving advice and by being approachable and supportive.

We’d like you to have some experience in the game industry, preferably working with PC and/or Console Games but other relevant experiences will be taken into consideration. With this exposure, we expect you to understand the most common technical challenges as well as the life cycle of a successful project and how to adapt with your team to each phase. True to our core values of trust and autonomy, we won't dictate your mandates but instead will empower you and your team to decide what needs to be done and how to get there. The Art director and the Tech director will be there to help you in this endeavor.

Specific Role Requirements:

• You are a human-focused person. As a professional, you deeply care for your colleagues and are always here to help them. Being patient and adapting your speech to the technical level of your interlocutor is a must.
• Some experience working in Games. As a veteran, we will respect your hard-learned skills and will try our best to make sure you can use your strengths daily. We will adjust the title to your seniority.
• We value people with a deep knowledge in a specific domain just as well as people with a breadth of knowledge and ability to help on many fronts.
• Experience with Unreal Engine is preferable, if not showing that you can quickly ramp up because you have solved similar problems as what we are facing is mandatory. You should have a passion for teaching and sharing your knowledge with others.

• Having experience with optimization (shaders, materials, data) is preferable.
• Having some experience with DCCs (Maya, Blender, Substance) and Profilers (Unreal Insight, Pix, renderdoc, etc) is a nice to have.
• You have a critical eye for Art and you bring strong fundamental skills like colour theory, timing, composition, balance, secondary action. As such you have a good experience adapting to various tones and art styles.
• An in-depth understanding of workflows as they relate to different disciplines within the Art Department (Animation, Lighting, Characters, Environment, VFX).
• We hope you are someone who plays games regularly and understands where the bar is in terms of performance and quality in the industry.
• You always want to learn more and improve regardless of your seniority. You are the one telling us what you will learn next, not the other way around.
• We expect excellent communication skills in order to collaborate effectively with a diverse group of artists, designers and animators. It’s a very important part of the job as things often happen organically in our studio.
• We expect high levels of autonomy and proactivity as it would help you to thrive in our work culture.
• We would like you to be somebody who values the maintainability as well as the readability of your technical work (code/ node graphs) as it leads to better teamwork and collaboration within the discipline and beyond.

This is a contract (6 Months FTC) role and we can offer full-remote setups globally.

Apply via:https://compulsiongames.bamboohr.com/careers/90