Lead Environment Artist

Lead Environment Artist

For more than twenty years, Criterion Games has entertained millions of players around the world with award-winning titles. We’re a team renowned for our expertise and passion for delivering phenomenal game feel, AAA audiovisual quality, technical innovation and for pushing boundaries to create immersive narratives.

With a proud history working on beloved franchises including Battlefield, Star Wars Battlefront and Burnout, we’re now challenging the conventions of the racing genre to take the Need For Speed franchise to the next level.

We’re recognised as one of the best places to work in the UK, and we believe that healthy, diverse and engaged teams make great games, so we place enormous value on collaboration, fresh ideas, and unique perspectives. We'd love to hear yours!

Lead Environment Artist

We are looking for a Lead Environment Artist to help us drive our new and exciting endeavour to create an open world offering the player a fast, visceral and authentic experience. You will report to the Environment Director.

What you'll do:

• Work with the Environment Director to establish Environment Theming & Tone, using reference to authentically recreate areas of the world and contributing directly to direction briefs.
• Provide high quality art content that contributes to many different aspects of our world, setting the bar across our external partners.
• Mentoring more junior members of our team and looking for opportunities to develop their skills and career.
• Autonomously push quality in specific areas of our content production and teach others how to reach that quality.
• Work with the Environment Director and Technical Art team to explore and test different methods for creating and laying out the world, including procedural layout tools, developing new workflows and standards.
• Own significant sections of the world, defining and scoping requirements and establishing detailed goals for yourself and your teammates.
• Work with the tech art and engineering teams to help establish performance and memory budgets to set achievable targets for world density. Assets must be built to quality and within technical budgets.
• Be an ambassador to ensure our world is fun and fair, authentic in appearance and viscerally exciting for the player.

What we would love you to bring:

• Experience as a senior member of the team that has made world content in Video Games on console.
• Experience using a range of game world production content tools, such as Unreal Engine, Frostbite, Maya, 3DS Max and Substance.
• A perspective on current trends and workflows that will help push the games we make to the next level and a confidence to communicate to help make that happen.
• Excellent sense of visual composition, form and colour.
• Feedback to both our external partners and our world team to constantly push for quality, not exclusively caring about the work you are directly involved in.
• Experience with many different methods for creating a game world including modular systems and usage of procedural tools.
• Experience helping develop and use new tools and workflows related to world creation.
• Excellent knowledge of how to manage content for games in an optimized and performant manner.
• An appreciation of the Arts, Animation, Visual Design and a knowledge of games that deliver great experiences.
• An appreciation or knowledge of architecture, urban planning, and visual design.
  
  

Please submit a portfolio/demo reel link with your application.