Creature Programmer

6 Minutes ago • 4 Years +

Animation

Job Description

Giant Sparrow is seeking a Creature Programmer to develop unsettlingly alive creatures for their new game, which focuses on a field biologist interacting with a wide variety of mundane and fantastical creatures. This role involves a mix of procedural animation, physics, AI, and gameplay programming to create mesmerizing and strange animal interactions. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in technically complex, player-facing systems and a keen interest in analyzing real animal movement and behavior to enhance the creatures' sense of liveliness and responsiveness.

Good To Have:

Experience with Unreal
An interest in science and biology

Must Have:

4+ years of experience as a professional game developer
Strong background in C++
An interest in procedural animation
Comfortable with vector math and basic physics

Add these skills to join the top 1% applicants for this job

real-time-vfx

rigging

unity

unreal

cpp

game-texts

prototyping

creature

shell

vector-math

We're looking for a programmer who can help us bring our creatures to life.

Our new game is about a field biologist interacting with a wide variety of mundane and fantastical creatures. We're trying to create moments that echo the mesmerizing strangeness and familiarity of real-life encounters with wild animals. Like a grub crawling on a hand, a starfish waving its arms, or a lizard emerging from its shell but filtered through an aesthetic that includes classic fairytales, Jim Henson, and Junji Ito.

Your primary focus will be on finding programmatic ways to help our creatures feel unsettlingly alive. That's likely to include a mix of procedural animation, physics, AI, and gameplay programming. It's OK if you don't have direct experience in all these areas but you should have a background that includes technically complex, player-facing systems.

Any experience with traditional gameplay programming would be helpful too. In this game creatures ARE gameplay so there's a lot of overlap between the various systems. The underlying goal for us is an experience that feels responsive which in this game is often synonymous with feeling alive.

This might be a good fit for you if you'd enjoy:

Analyzing real animal movement and behavior to figure out ways to improve our creatures' sense of liveliness.
Working with designers on gameplay prototypes, eg building a prehensile tongue that can "crawl" around the environment in a suitably stretchy, squishy way.
Creating robust Control Rigs that are responsive to player input, eg a belly being poked with a pencil.
Exploring Unreal's procedural VFX systems including Grooms and Chaos Flesh. Our goal is to create characters that can playfully respond to perturbation like Ryan Corneil's Unreal puppets.
Collaborating with character artists and animators on building and polishing our creatures.