Gameplay (and Creature) Programmer
Job Summary
Job Description
- 4+ years of experience as a professional game developer
- Strong background in C++
- Comfortable with vector math and basic physics
- Experience with Unreal
- An interest in science and biology
- An interest in procedural animation
7 skills required
Job Details
Gameplay (and Creature) Programmer
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 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.
Must haves
- 4+ years of experience as a professional game developer
- Strong background in C++
- Comfortable with vector math and basic physics
Nice to haves
- Experience with Unreal
- An interest in science and biology
- An interest in procedural animation
This role could be fully remote or you can join us in Los Angeles if you'd like.
If you think you'd be a good fit, please contact us.
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About The Company
Giant Sparrow is a tiny video game company focused on creating surreal experiences people have never had before. Our dream is to make the world a stranger, more interesting place.
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