Senior or Lead Environment Artist/Level Designer (Salary: $50,000 to $110,000)
Lunarch is seeking an exceptional Environment Artist with amazing Level Design skills to help us create a breathtaking open world for Project Sophia—a multiplayer puzzle game for PC and consoles developed in Unreal Engine. We’re aiming for a high-end, distinctive, sublimely beautiful fantasy-photorealistic look on a AA budget.
In this role, you’ll be a key contributor to the world construction with a strong focus on landscaping, architecture, and level design. You’ll collaborate with a wide range of team members at a small studio, so we’re looking for exceptionally talented and creative individuals who are comfortable wearing many hats.
Requirements:
- Several years of experience in a level design, worldbuilding, level art, or environment art role
- Excellent working knowledge of Unreal Engine’s environment creation tools (terrain, foliage, etc.)
- A strong portfolio or multiple shipped titles demonstrating your environment creation skills
- Visual flair, artistic talent, and knowledge of level design and level composition principles
- In-depth understanding of architecture, landscaping, visual storytelling and open world design
- Basic knowledge of PBR (physically based rendering), lighting, fog, and water systems
- Exceptional communication skills and ability to effectively interact with other team members
Key Responsibilities:
- Design and build sublimely beautiful open world environments and dungeons for a multiplayer puzzle game with a fantasy-photorealistic art style
- Work with our puzzle designers to implement environmental puzzles and build spaces that can be densely filled puzzles of many different types
- Collaborate on environment lookdev with the Art Director and Concept Artist by constructing maquettes, mock-ups, and blockouts
- Achieve specific mood, tone, and vibe objectives as specified by our Narrative Lead
- Work with our Game Director to optimize environments for explorability, navigability, and flow
- Keep an eye on asset quality to ensure the project meets its artistic goals
- Implement effective solutions to problems encountered in the construction of an open world environment
Expertise in some of the following would be an asset, but are not required:
- Procedural or modular environment creation tools
- Terrain creation tools (World Machine, Gaea, etc.)
- Creation and editing of 3D assets such as trees, foliage, architecture, or puzzle elements (including modeling, texturing, material creation, etc.)
- Matte painting or 2D concept art
- Puzzle design or experience working on games with environmental puzzles
- Performance optimization for environments
About Lunarch Studios
Lunarch is a small (~15 people) Canadian game developer founded in 2013 by a group of math olympiad champions, professional poker players, and MIT PhD students. We develop cutting-edge, intelligent games that leverage technology to create novel and deep experiences for smart players. Our products are ambitious, one-of-a-kind titles that define new genres and innovate in multiple directions at once. Their creation demands exceptional intelligence, creativity, and hard work.
We're the developers behind Prismata—a multiplayer strategy game that blends elements of RTS, deckbuilders, and board games. Our upcoming title (“Project Sophia”) is similarly innovative and aims to bring large-scale multiplayer gameplay to the 3D puzzle genre (Portal, The Witness, Zelda, etc.).
Lunarch is more like a tech startup than a traditional game studio. We're in a competitive space that rewards quickness and demands high-quality work that meets all requirements on the first try. Ideal candidates are exceptionally intelligent, knowledgeable about games, and highly productive. We love people who have excelled in competitions (math/programming contests, puzzlehunts, science fairs, infosec CTF, competitive gaming, poker, etc.), people with heroic academic accomplishments (awards, publications, etc.), or people with proven track records or killer portfolios (shipped games or jaw-dropping work in art/animation/audio/UI/design/etc.).
The benefits of Lunarch include an excellent work culture and high-tier compensation (aiming to be competitive with tech startups), but most importantly, you’ll contribute to ambitious titles that aim to make meaningful advances to the state of the art. We operate in an ideal mid-budget space: we’re sufficiently well-funded to hire the best people, do high-quality work, and promote our titles widely, but we’re not constrained by the AAA need to stick with low-risk designs for mass-market audiences. You will make an impact here.
Contact: careers@lunarchstudios.com