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 Narrative Designer

Position Summary:

As a Senior Narrative Designer you will play an important role in shaping the narrative direction of our upcoming titles. You will be creating and implementing complex, engaging storylines and characters, ensuring they align with the project’s tone and creative vision. You will also have a chance to share your expertise with junior team members to help grow their skills in all aspects of narrative design.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Support the collaboration with writers, designers, and Project Leadership to develop compelling, in-depth story content that reflects the project’s tone and creative vision.
• Implement and integrate narrative elements into the game, ensuring consistency and quality across all narrative components.
• Write combat barks, quest banter, and branching dialogue, ensuring high-quality narrative elements throughout the game.
• Mentor and guide junior narrative designers, offering feedback and sharing best practices to strengthen the team's writing and narrative integration skills.
• Help create the documentation of character bios, lore for objects, locations, items, and other in-game narrative assets.
• Collaborate closely with Lead Writer on strategic narrative decisions, offering insights and recommendations to enhance the overall game experience.
• Partake in narrative-related meetings and discussions, ensuring that narrative objectives are clear and achievable.
• Work collaboratively with external partners and stakeholders when necessary
• Other duties as assigned.

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience writing for games or other entertainment industries.
• Proven ability to craft complex, coherent, and engaging stories and characters that resonate with diverse audiences.
• Extensive experience writing and implementing sophisticated branching narratives.
• Proficiency with game engines like Unreal.
• Deep understanding of editing standards, with extensive experience editing both creative and technical documents.
• Solid grasp of advanced game-design fundamentals and principles, with the ability to contribute to design discussions and decisions.
• Demonstrated ability to rapidly iterate on feedback, with a willingness both to receive and provide constructive critical feedback at a high level.

Submission/Portfolio Requirements:

• Must provide a writing samples and/or be willing to complete a design test

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