Spry Fox Making Happiness

Spry Fox is looking for a 3D Art Lead to help us work on a new, original game — a stylized, joyful and non-violent MMO project!

Our 3d Art Lead will be a key role, bridging the gap between Engineering, Design and Art. We are looking for a talented, multi-disciplinary 3d artist who loves to dive into the organizational and technical side of things, and strives to find systemic and scalable solutions to keep the team moving. You will establish and maintain our art pipelines and processes while helping drive key visuals in the game. You will need to be very comfortable with all the technical and creative aspects of art production.

Responsibilities:

• Setting up and maintaining standards and art pipelines for characters, environments, props, VFX, UI and animation in collaboration with those disciplines.
• Collaborating between Engineering, Design and Art to make sure our art pipelines support our needs while meeting artistic standards.
• Creating clear, thorough documentation of best practices for artists and keeping it up-to-date as pipelines evolve.
• Ensuring that pipelines can scale to hit specific performance targets.
• Finding creative solutions and tools to help streamline art workflows.
• Assist in long-term scoping and velocity tracking for the art team.
• Assist in providing feedback to the art team and outsource partners to ensure technical and visual standards are kept.
• Assisting Art team in asset creation.
• Helping drive the visuals of key aspects of the game through technical prowess and research as needed.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience working as a 3d artist in games.
• Portfolio or other showcase of multi-disciplinary knowledge of 3d art development in Unreal Engine 4 (required); Modeling, Texturing, Advanced Material\Shader setup, Lighting, Animation (Some rigging experience preferred but not required.)
• Knowledge and appreciation for stylized, NPR workflows and art styles.

Plusses:

• Prior MMO development experience.
• Prior examples of pipeline development\management.

We love to see candidates from under-represented backgrounds. If you think you might fit our needs but aren’t sure, please, don’t hold back! Send us your resume. The absolute worst that could happen is that we’ll receive your email with gratitude and let you know that while this opportunity might not be the best fit for you, others we’ll have in the very near future could be. So go ahead and get on our radar!

What are we offering?

• 40 hours a week: we treat crunch like the result of serious mistakes that we’ve made, not a natural and inevitable part of the development process.
• Interesting, original work as part of a small, supportive, and friendly team full of thoughtful people who care deeply about each other and about our impact on our players’ lives.
• The opportunity to work on a game unlike anything that has ever been made before, with (among other things) meaningful goals to improve people’s lives and reduce toxicity and loneliness in the world.

Please send your full resume, references, and anything else you think we should see to jobs@spryfox.com.

What’s it like working for Spry Fox?

Spry Fox’s motto is “make the world a better place.” We try to do that through the games we make, whether that’s by designing MMOs that encourage the development of friendships and discourage toxicity, or by designing our puzzle game, Alphabear 2, to promote English language learning. We’re always asking ourselves “how does this game improve your life?”

We also strive to be a company that is a pleasure to work for. We hope to be an important but not dominating part of your life. We want you to have friends, family, hobbies, and a life outside of work. We want you to love your colleagues and know that they support you 100%. We want you to be proud of what you do and how you do it.

We make highly original games. Invention is part of our DNA. You’ll be working on designs that often don’t fit in a comfy genre box.

We’re fully remote, and have always (11+ years) been fully remote, which means you have the flexibility to work your 40 hours a week from where ever you like, and in whatever configuration you’d like. This is not something we’re just trying to adapt to in response to the pandemic. As long as you have an overlap with your team almost every day, let people know what you’re up to, and don’t leave the rest of us hanging, almost anything goes.

We currently have Foxes in Europe, South Africa, South America, Canada, and the US. We have a retreat once a year to come together, bond, discuss the long-term future of projects and the company, and stay up way too late chatting around campfires. (A tradition that will resume as soon as the covid pandemic is under control.)

We have lives outside of work. Lots of us have children. Different Foxes enjoy playing music, reading books, storytelling RPGs, talking politics, and/or traveling. Some of us even play games!

Spry Fox recognizes crunch is a negative and counter-productive practice in our industry. We consider more than a couple of weeks of crunch in a year to be a serious failure of management — something to be learned from and avoided in the future. And we are proud to say that we have never crunched for more than six continuous weeks in the eleven year history of our studio (a blemish consigned to our distant past, hopefully forever.)