Spry Fox Making Happiness

We’re looking for a highly skilled Unreal Shader Technical Artist that can bridge the gap between Art and Engineering. This is a key role in developing the unique artistic style of our game. Extensive knowledge of shading, lighting, rendering, and post processing is required, as well as a strong understanding of the 3D-graphics pipeline and a keen eye for aesthetics and best art practices.

Responsibilities:

• Setting up and maintaining standards for optimized shaders, fx, and rendering solutions 
• Helping to drive framerate and memory optimization on a wide range of target platforms, running tests on the latest shaders
• Creating and iterating on material, post-processing, and environmental shaders
• Collaborate with art and engineering, understand their disciplines, and help them hit the art quality and performance they’re looking for
• Provide and maintain technical documentation
• Help drive the visuals of key aspects of the game and solve problems through technical skill and research.

Qualifications:

• At least 3+ years of professional experience working as a technical artist in games
• Portfolio or other showcase of work developed in Unreal Engine 4 (required)
• Experience with Advanced Materials, Shaders, Lighting, and Rendering Pipelines
• Knowledge and experience with non-photorealistic workflows and art styles
• Proficient understanding of 3D Art Pipelines (Maya, Photoshop, Substance, etc.)

Plusses:

• Programming knowledge (C++, C#, Python, or similar)
• Prior MMO development experience
• Understanding of how to optimize for mobile devices as well as PC/console
• Ability to create and support artist tools in Maya and help standardize workflows

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 about each other and care 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 (10+ 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.

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.

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 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.)