Senior Technical Level Artist

Ghost Story Games is a self-publishing game development studio founded by Ken Levine (Creative Director of System Shock 2, Bioshock, and Bioshock Infinite) and former Irrational Games developers.  The studio’s mission is to create narrative-driven experiences rooted in immersive world building and gameplay. 

Ghost Story Games is a self-publishing game development studio founded by Ken Levine (Creative Director of System Shock 2, Bioshock, and Bioshock Infinite) and former Irrational Games developers. The studio’s mission is to create narrative-driven experiences rooted in immersive world building and gameplay. 

Ghost Story Games is seeking a talented Senior Technical Level Artist to join us on Judas, the highly anticipated game led by Ken Levine (System Shock 2, BioShock series).  Unique in its creative vision, Judas is also built upon novel technology by which the visual world, gameplay, and story unfolds in meaningful, dynamic ways.  The result is a significant and personal journey adapted to each player’s experience and offers a new approach to the art and storytelling of video games.  

For the Senior Technical Level Artist role, you should be experienced in a breadth and depth of generalist real-time CG expertise, including modular level layout and scene composition, modeling, materials, and lighting. You should be passionate about telling compelling stories through environmental art, while thoughtfully crafting spaces and visuals with the needs of gameplay in mind. It is essential the Senior Technical Level Artist is fully immersed in the novel technical pipelines, world and storytelling systems of Judas. We both expect and welcome you to contribute creative and technical suggestions to elevate the technology and workflows further, while collaborating closely together with Narrative, Design, and other Art counterparts, to bring the best vision of Judas to life.

At Ghost Story Games we place the utmost importance on memorable, immersive visual storytelling, through all aspects of the game experience, and the close team collaboration necessary to realize a shared vision together.  Join us and play a key role in Judas’ success!

• You will work with the Art Director and Lead Artist and various level art teams to ensure the various thematic spaces of the world of Judas are executed to a high degree of technical and creative standards.

• With a deep immersion in the lore and purpose of the environmental spaces you will leverage your technical skillset and approach to thoughtful world building and visual storytelling.  You will help span narrative-driven visual support of quests, the development of overall environmental ‘theme’ visual identities, and support key Level and System Design features that overlap the environmental design of Judas.

• You will develop a deep understanding of the Judas’ visual and level building systems: how its thematic spaces are built, organized, and triggered in-game. This includes partnering with level artists and quest pods to ensure those spaces are set up correctly and functioning as intended, and collaborating with tech and QA to troubleshoot and resolve any issues.

• Serve as the key driver of all visual assets supporting spaces under your responsibility.  This includes highly proactive and collaborative engagement with Art Leadership, Level and Narrative Design, Concept Art, and External Art Vendors 

• As a Senior Technical Level Artist, you are expected to help uphold the high standards of aesthetic and technical quality of your own work and leverage your expertise to identify opportunities for both visual and technical quality improvements across the project and effectively pitch to project leadership

• Established experience in the game industry as a Senior Artist, preferably with experience working with larger, complex productions

• Proficient art and technical experience within a real-time Game Engine (Unreal 4 is a plus).

• Experienced eye for form, line, value, rhythm, composition, and crafting deliberate visual hierarchy reads (focus direction, small-medium-large shape balance, ‘80/20 rule’)

• Familiarity with performance evaluation and optimization – working mindfully within metrics to maintain a smooth player experience

• Experience with effective team-based iteration techniques, including a thoughtful consideration of the bigger picture of the overall game experience and creative vision and an ‘order of operation’ and ‘ROI’ approach to iterative development.  

• Ability to learn and understand technical tools and systems so they can be pushed to the limit to create the most visually interesting spaces

• Proactive problem solver that enjoys cross-department collaboration, asks engaging questions, and can thoughtfully pitch both creative and visual ideas, as well as technical and process improvements to benefit the quality and efficiency of the project

• For the Senior role, we are especially looking for individuals with experience and mindfulness towards both individual and team efficiency, and proven ability to work on more challenging cross-functional tasks with a very high degree of ambiguity and autonomy

• Passion for deeply narrative driven games, particularly First Person Shooters

• Additional traditional art, lighting, or cinematography background

• Experience working effectively and collaborative with a diverse mix of internal and distributed teams