Senior Technical Artist

Beamdog is a fantastic place to work with a friendly and creative atmosphere. Located in Edmonton, Alberta, we're a hardworking team of passionate game developers who love the games we work on. Since 2009, we’ve brought enhanced versions of classic Dungeons & Dragons games and exciting original content to fans new and old. We’re best known for bringing beloved isometric roleplaying games like Baldur’s Gate™ and Planescape: Torment™ back to life on desktop and tablets as Enhanced Editions. We love rich stories where players can chose their own journey and the communities that spring up around them. If you’re excited about storytelling games, Dungeons & Dragons, and classic RPGs, stick around! You haven’t seen anything yet!

Position Summary:

Reporting to the Development Director, you have the technical skills to prototype, implement, and improve workflows and tools for artists. Throughout your career you’ve developed a thorough understanding of the Unreal Engine art pipeline and common rendering techniques, and you value the importance of delivering optimized assets, and asset pipelines. This includes shader creation, materials setup and management, lighting setups. You place a strong emphasis on collaboration with content creators and work comfortably with artists, designers, and programmers.

As a proactive problem solver, you support the art team by establishing and documenting standards and best practices for character, material, VFX and environment construction. Your solutions are robust and simple to help the team keep new art content manageable and easy to produce. This position can be either Hybrid based in Edmonton, Alberta, or Remote from across Canada.

Responsibilities:

• Work closely with artists, designers, and programmers to develop and maintain art content pipelines and workflows.
• Improve the artists’ day to day efficiency and experience by ensuring that the assets they create are built correctly, are game-ready, and optimized.
• Debug and solve technical challenges related to the art pipeline.
• Regularly work with profiling tools and programmers to identify and rectify performance bottlenecks early.
• Leverage your experience with existing solutions while seeking out and evaluating new features and techniques to help us create high quality art assets in the most economical fashion that we can.
• Take the artists perspective on tools to assess and recommend improvements to their workflows.

Qualifications:

• Experience with Unreal Engine 5 rendering features, tools, and best practices.
• Knowledge of common setups, tools, and workflows in Unreal Engine for shaders and materials, lighting, and standard character and environment pipelines.
• Thorough understanding of the relationship and integration points between Unreal Engine and DCC tools like Maya, Max, and Substance Suite.
• Comfortable with Maya, 3DS Max, or equivalent, and have experience operating with such packages.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills to help build agreement on solutions within the team.

Additional Skills:

• Rigging and animation skills are a bonus.
• Some basic familiarity with C++ is a bonus, but by no means required.

We offer the following perks:

• 3 weeks of flexible vacation plus a 1-week paid holiday closure per year.
• Generous sick and personal days
• Flexible working hours
• NO CRUNCH policy
• RRSP Matching Program
• Vision, dental, and extended health benefits
• Health & wellness spending account
  

Diversity is fundamentally about valuing human differences and recognizing that a diverse group of people bring with them a diverse set of skills which is necessary to propel our company forward. Beamdog is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from all qualified persons. We do not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, colour, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, marital status or any other legally protected status.

Senior Level Designer

Beamdog is a fantastic place to work with a friendly and creative atmosphere. Located in Edmonton, Alberta, we're a hardworking team of passionate game developers who love the games we work on. Since 2009, we’ve brought enhanced versions of classic Dungeons & Dragons games and exciting original content to fans new and old. We’re best known for bringing beloved isometric roleplaying games like Baldur’s Gate™ and Planescape: Torment™ back to life on desktop and tablets as Enhanced Editions. We love rich stories where players can chose their own journey and the communities that spring up around them. If you’re excited about storytelling games, Dungeons & Dragons, and classic RPGs, stick around! You haven’t seen anything yet!

Position Summary:

Senior Level Designers play an integral role in overseeing and constructing the game world of our titles. You will be planning, constructing and iterating on the gameplay space on a macro and micro scale to ensure a balanced and engaging experience for players within the constraints of the engine, tools and target platforms. You will facilitate interdepartmental communication with directors, designers, engineers and artists to ensure cohesive collaboration and execution that adhere to the project's tone and vision while working proactively to mentor junior team members to promote growth and skillset expansion. This position will either be hybrid, based in Edmonton, Alberta or remote based from anywhere in Canada.

Responsibilities:

• Create thoughtfully crafted layouts, gameplay environments and gameplay moments that guide our players through engaging and well paced experiences
• Collaborate closely with other designers, leads, directors and departments to understand the project vision and champion it through your designs to create a cohesive open-world experience
• Work to foster a highly iterative and collaborative environment across all disciplines
• Mentor junior designers in best practices, design techniques and promote a consistent growth mindset
• Capability to make independent creative decisions that reinforce the games creative vision and direction within set constraints
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of our tools and developmental processes

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience in Level design
• Ability to create harmonious and balanced designs through a deep fundamental understanding of the interaction between game space, gameplay systems, narrative, artistic requirements and constraints
• High proficiency in 3D Layout programs (Unreal Engine, etc)
• High proficiency in game scripting and familiarity with quest content and branching dialogue systems
• Working knowledge of RPG game conventions
• Ability to create functional layouts with an eye towards quick assessment of mechanics, systems and events to facilitate efficient iteration

Preferred:

• A love of role-playing games, science fiction, fantasy and strategic gameplay
• Previous open-world game development experience
• Have a strong eye for environmental storytelling
• Experience working with Unreal blueprints

Submission/Portfolio Requirements:

• Specific examples of work in shipped games or a web portfolio that showcases proficiency in specific skills described above

We offer the following perks:

• 3 weeks of flexible vacation plus a 1-week paid holiday closure per year.
• Generous sick and personal days
• Flexible working hours
• NO CRUNCH policy
• RRSP Matching Program
• Vision, dental, and extended health benefits
• Health & wellness spending account
  

Diversity is fundamentally about valuing human differences and recognizing that a diverse group of people bring with them a diverse set of skills which is necessary to propel our company forward. Beamdog is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from all qualified persons. We do not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, colour, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, marital status or any other legally protected status.