The game studio that made the critically-acclaimed game The Witness is looking for a highly experienced animator. You should be able to work quickly and fluently in Maya. We need someone who is familiar with the full game development pipeline, communicates and works with programmers fluidly to maintain the current animation workflow, and pushes to improve on it efficiently where possible. This person should be someone who isn't afraid to get into the trenches with designers and artists to solve problems. The ability to create quick, rough work, and iterate on it as needed is a must. You should be self-motivated and responsible, as you will own all of the existing animation tasks and any new ones that may arise, and be expected to find and tackle priorities proactively. You should take initiative to recognize problems, stay productive, and keep up with the team without being pushed too much. 

Our studio is a passionate, close-knit, small team who aims to produce the highest quality, most cohesive art we can. So you should be adaptable, flexible, able to catch on to our workflows quickly, and be consistent and hard-working, as we rely on everyone to do their part to make our game special. 

Thekla is currently fully remote and has few official meetings, instead, we tend to have organic discussions throughout the day on Slack and through email. With this in mind, you should have great communication skills and enjoy collaborating and keeping in touch with your teammates. You should proactively reach out for critique, give and receive feedback and be able to quickly incorporate it into your work. This position works closely with other Artists, the Art Director, and Designers, so being an excellent collaborator is necessary.

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The following are the requirements of this position:

• Animate humans in a naturalistic style
• Animations should have excellent grasp of weight and balance
• Animations should be smooth and natural
• Animations should support fluid gameplay and feel responsive and snappy while maintaining style and intention 
• Create quick rough animations to try out ideas (and also to refine it into something highly nuanced, while also paying close attention to gameplay limitations)
• Work in our established pipeline from Maya to our custom game engine, and fill in the gaps that have not yet been established 
• Make intelligent decisions relating to rigging, tools used, naming conventions, file/folder structure, etc
• Game development experience is a must
• Catch on to workflows and gameplay needs quickly; adapt to those workflows  and needs; for example; create rough animations while problems are being solved
• Work closely with other game artists and art lead; needs to be a solid collaborator
• Needs to have initiative and be proactive
• Similar timezone, or have the availability to easily work together during some core hours during the day
• Being able to pick up work done by someone else and complete it to a high level of polish

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Location:

While this role is remote, we expect you to join us for in-person in meetings in Denver, CO. for 1 week every 3 months. We also ask that your working hours have at least a few hours of overlap time with the team.

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How to apply:

If interested in this position, please send us an email with your resume and portfolio.

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Our Upcoming Release:

Here's a sneak peek at work-in-progress visuals of our new game: