Senior 2D Tech Artist/Animator, Games Studio

Spry Fox’s motto is “make the world a better place.” We try to do that through the games we make, whether that’s by designing MMOs that encourage the development of friendships and discourage toxicity, or by designing our puzzle game, Alphabear 2, to promote English language learning. We’re always asking ourselves “how does this game improve your life?”
We also strive to be a company that is a pleasure to work for. We hope to be an important but not dominating part of your life. We want you to have friends, family, hobbies, and a life outside of work. We want you to love your colleagues and know that they support you 100%. We want you to be proud of what you do and how you do it.

We make highly original games. Invention is part of our DNA. You’ll be working on designs that often don’t fit in a comfy genre box.

We’re fully remote, and have always (12+ years) been fully remote, which means you have the flexibility to work your 40 hours a week from where ever you like, and in whatever configuration you’d like. As long as you have an overlap with your team almost every day, let people know what you’re up to, and don’t leave the rest of us hanging, almost anything goes.
We currently have Foxes in Europe, South Africa, South America, Canada, and the USA. We have a retreat once a year to come together, bond, discuss the long-term future of projects and the company, and stay up way too late chatting around campfires. We try to be online from 10am to 2pm PST in order to ensure that we have enough overlapping work hours with each other, and otherwise, our schedules are flexible and fully under our individual control! We have lives outside of work. Lots of us have children. Different Foxes enjoy playing music, reading books, storytelling RPGs, and traveling.

Spry Fox recognizes crunch is a negative and counter-productive practice in our industry. We consider more than a couple of weeks of crunch in a year to be a serious failure of management — something to be learned from and avoided in the future. And we have never crunched for more than six continuous weeks in the eleven year history of our studio (a blemish consigned to our distant past, hopefully forever.

Last but not least, we’re a part of Netflix now. This means that we can do what we love doing with much more support, and without having to worry about how to monetize our games at all. We’re still focused on making thoughtful, original games, more than ever really. 

ABOUT THE JOB
We (Spry Fox) are looking for a skilled 2D Technical Artist and Animator to help us bring to life the sequel to our life-sim game, Cozy Grove! Ideally someone who has thoughtful opinions about the life-sim genre and a body of work that showcases advanced technical skills, VFX, and animation with stylized and cozy aesthetics.

RESPONSIBILITIES

 
Creating stylized 2D VFX in Unity, working alongside art and design to adhere to stylistic guidance and hit design goals, proactively soliciting and incorporating feedback from both departments
 
Ability to create highly polished rigs and dozens of expressive animations for 2D puppets
 
Collaborating with engineering and ensuring work meets performance goals
 
Work with producers to track tasks, help scope future work, and balance your workload
 
Communicating decisions and tradeoffs to the rest of the team
 
Implementing art in Unity and following file organization conventions while creating assets
 
Assist with improving and updating the asset production pipeline and maintaining documentation


QUALIFICATIONS

 
A portfolio demonstrating strong technical art skills in Unity on 2D games
 
Examples of stylized VFX and animation
 
Proficient in Unity, Photoshop, and Spine rigging and animation
 
Experience working with and/or improving art production pipelines


DESIRABLE ADDITIONAL SKILLS

 
Familiarity with node based shaders in Unity (Amplify Shader Editor, Shader Graph, or equivalent) to be used in vfx or materials
 
Proficiencies with cute, cozy, and stylized isometric illustration
 
Experience leading or training artists in related processes


If you are not already, we recommend you familiarize yourself with:

 
Slack
 
Google Drive
 
Github and\or a Git client such as Fork, Sourcetree, or other version control software


What are we offering?

 
40 hours a week: we treat crunch like the result of serious mistakes that we’ve made, not a natural and inevitable part of the development process.
 
Interesting, original work as part of a small, supportive, and friendly team full of thoughtful people who care about each other and care about our impact on our players’ lives.
 
Work from home – no commute!
 
Great benefits (we’re part of Netflix now – big company benefits are pretty nice.)
 
The opportunity to work on a game unlike anything that has ever been made before, with, among other things, meaningful goals to improve people’s lives and reduce toxicity and loneliness in the world. We take this very seriously.