Who are we?
Hypersonic Labs is building HELIX, the ultimate open-world multiplayer sandbox. We are a remote-first, international team and have raised $11M from top gaming VCs.
About the role
As Lead Artist, you’ll help lead our team of internal and outsourced/ contract artists and animators to build a library of high quality, performant and consistent assets for players to use to customize their open world roleplay servers. Assets include large scale open world environments, props and decorations, avatar clothing, vehicles, UI elements and more.
This is a remote position, open to candidates who are based in the UK.
What you will be doing
- Manage the HELIX art team, including internal team members, contractors and outsourcing team/s.
- Oversee the creation of high quality assets including environment and character 3D art, 2D UI elements and illustrations, large scale open world environments (maps), animations and more.
- Optimize our pipeline for serving internal asset demand, and work with our Developer Relations team to fill our library full of great, high demand assets for our creator community.
- Review assets targeted for licensing to ensure they’re up to our standards for performance and quality.
- Work with your artists and the engineering team to set target specifications and guidelines for assets.
What we will need from you
- Experience leading an art team within a game studio (or adjacent) context.
- Experience managing art outsourcing teams and contractors.
- General experience across all areas of game art creation: 3D and 2D art, animations, UI and open world environments. We don’t expect you to be an expert in everything, but you should be able to evaluate and manage across all areas.
- Proven track record of delivering high quality assets to spec and on time.
- A strong eye for detail and art direction, particularly for AAA modern city styles. You want to create modern-feeling cities filled with love and tiny details.
- Knowledge of Unreal Engine art pipelines is essential. HELIX is built on UE5.
- Excellent organizational and communication skills, written and verbal.
- You enjoy working in remote teams. You thrive in an environment where everyone works flexibly online (we use Discord).
Nice to have
- Experience creating assets for an open world, modern-setting AAA game greatly preferred.
- Understanding of games-as-platforms, modding, “UGC” platforms like Roblox or Fortnite UEFN.
- Live Ops and/or Platform experience preferred.
- Understanding of GTA Roleplay or equivalent servers (FiveM).
- Basic knowledge of Lua scripting will save you time when integrating and testing assets.