Spry Fox Making Happiness

NOTE: This position has been filled. We are no longer hiring.

We’re looking for a Character Artist who can create vibrant and clean character assets for a 3rd person, non-violent MMO. You’ll be responsible for creating models and materials for player characters, their clothing, wildlife, and creatures for a pro-social, stylized, multiplayer game.

Responsibilities:

• Authoring character models for customizable avatars, clothing, NPCs, and creatures both mundane and imaginative
• Collaborating with Art Direction to work on cel-shaded, non-PBR assets.
• Implementing your asset into UE4.
• Working with Art Lead to help identify necessary workflow and pipeline improvements.
• Working with Animators and developers on a relatively small team (for an MMO) to make sure that content is optimized for performance on multiple platforms.

Qualifications:

• A portfolio that demonstrates both a strong understanding of fundamentals of human and creature anatomy and how to stylize it, as well a sense of cuteness and appeal in silhouettes and proportions.
• A willingness to work with texturing techniques not standard to the industry.
• At least 4+ years of 3D character or related experience.
• Experience balancing the tradeoff between asset detail and breadth of content.
• Proficiency with high poly to low poly sculpting pipelines.

Plusses:

• Prior experience with UE4 character art (skeletal meshes, third person characters, etc.)
• Skinning and UE4 Material creation experience.
• Any 3D generalist skills such as animation and VFX

We love to see candidates from under-represented backgrounds. Especially for this position, we’d love a Character Artist who can help push us to do well with our player character representation. 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 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, or by designing our life sim, Cozy Grove, to encourage empathy, 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.

We have lives outside of work. Lots of us have children. Different Foxes enjoy playing music, reading books, storytelling RPGs, and 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.)