Studio Art Manager

It’s a really exciting time to be at Space Ape Games. We’ve created a fast-paced environment that promotes genuine autonomy and we have projects at all stages of the development cycle. We launched our hit music game, Beatstar, in 2021 and we’re following its success with Countrystar less than two years later. We also officially launched our first puzzle game in 2023, Chrome Valley Customs, and we’re focusing on scaling this game to further global success. On top of all this, we’re running several mature live games and working on some exciting new projects behind the scenes!

We seek a passionate, creative Studio Art Manager to drive and pioneer how we deliver beautiful, engaging content for our players across a wide portfolio of new, in-development and live titles.

As Studio Art Manager, you will be responsible for and oversee all aspects of creative content production across development and marketing. You will lead studio-wide improvements, focusing on team performance and health. You'll use your skills as a mentor and manager to develop individuals, driving personal growth in teamwork, communication and artistic quality. By bringing together people, materials and tools, you will ensure our art team and games thrive through the production of world-class content.

You will be responsible for diligently identifying suitable vendors across multiple visual content disciplines in line with the needs of our projects throughout their development lifecycles. You are crucial in helping assess art requirements across the projects and aiding development teams and stakeholders in delivering high-quality, cost-effective assets through external partners.

Your role is to help drive, implement, and improve the creative processes, methods, workflows, and tools to deliver artwork outside the internal game team’s capabilities. You will assist in tracking progress against the game team’s milestone goals and ensuring both the internal and external teams are fully aligned throughout development.

Alongside the Studio Art Director, You’ll seek to foster an open, fun, and transparent development culture and be crucial in maintaining a healthy art culture and artists' personal development, growth and well-being.

Responsibilities

• Be responsible for the process, schedule and quality aspects of the art development and marketing pipelines, including establishing the framework, capacity planning, resource management and budget
• Work with leadership to define the strategy to execute against content milestones and key deliverables
• Ensure creative teams have the best organisational structure, processes and practices that allow them to produce high-quality artwork efficiently, on time and within budget
• Drive content pipeline efficiencies and new ways of thinking with the goal of reducing waste and increasing productivity
• Foster an engaging, fulfilling and fun working environment
• Establish regular communication with the team and key stakeholders to provide content status updates
• Develop, maintain and publish content updates that track project quality, delivery and performance
• Mentor and manage existing production individuals and teams to drive personal growth and shared learnings across the studio
• Able to initiate or implement content pipeline improvements to achieve efficiencies and to act as a change agent for process improvements
• Prioritise and direct content development strategies to support near and long-range requirements & innovation
• Find potential partner opportunities for our organisation, build and maintain an artwork vendor database across all disciplines, and assist with keeping an up-to-date record of our preferred/trusted external partners – including rates per discipline.
• Be responsible for relationship management with our external partners across the business

Requirements

• Proven art production experience within the game industry as a Studio Art Manager or equivalent
• Experience as an Art Outsourcing manager, Art Manager or Art Lead within the game development arena.
• Proven management skills with clinical handling of agile development, allowing your team to execute the goals and craft the best content possible
• Experience in supervising Art OS production pipelines
• An adept strategist with careful planning to produce results, highlight obstacles and mitigate risk
• Experience with a range of production tools and game engine technologies (e.g. Jira, Trello, Photoshop, Maya, Unreal, Unity, etc)
• Effective leadership skills to balance and prioritise short-term solutions with long-term vision and goals
• Great attention to detail, strong verbal and written communication skills, and the ability to convey thoughts clearly and logically.
• Able to foster an environment of shared ownership, empowerment, accountability, constructive criticism, recognition, appreciation, and collaboration
• Good technical understanding of game development pipelines and processes
• An existing network of off-site development partners and art vendors
• Be able to display examples of previous production workflows and asset tracking that you have developed and implemented

Why Space Ape is right for you

• Be a part of one of several small empowered teams who inspire and challenge one another in the pursuit of our mission
• Autonomy to make your own impact with the support to help it happen
• Designated ‘Ape Space’ creative time where you are free to work on game concepts and ideas away from your day to day
• The freedom to further your skill set the way you want with a generous training budget
• An award winning studio that has been crowned one of the best places to work, for the last 6 years in a row!
• Help run and create games which bring joy to millions of players all over the world
• 5* Glassdoor rating - Check out our reviews
• Entered a long-term strategic partnership with Supercell in 2017
• Competitive salary & stock options

About Space Ape

Space Ape is an award winning mobile game studio in Central London and founded in 2012. Since then our five games have been played by over 170m people and have generated half a billion in revenue. We have around 150 employees, from 30 different nationalities and diverse backgrounds united in a mission to make the world's next great game. In 2017 we began a strategic partnership with Supercell (makers of Clash of Clans and part of Tencent).

Our music game, Beatstar, reached #1 download in 24 countries and is the top grossing music game globally. If country music is more your thing check out Country Star, a recent follow up to Beatstar!

Chrome Valley Customs, our new car restoration puzzle game, brings an innovative twist to cater to a large underserved segment of the world's most successful game genre. Within the first two months it became the top grossing car game globally and we're just getting started!

Space Ape was voted Best Game Developer, and Beatstar Game of the Year in the 2022 Pocket Gamer Mobile Game Awards in BAFTA London 2022. Its Game Lead, Charmie Kim, won Best Newcomer at the Develop Awards 2022, and it was short listed as one of Google Play User Choice Awards (Dec 2021). Space Ape won Mobile Developer of the Year in the Pocket Gamer Awards 2023.

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