Full-Time Principal Lighting Artist

Who We Are Ghost Story Games is a self-publishing game development studio. Our studio designed and released award-winning games, such as System Shock 2, BioShock and BioShock Infinite. We are currently working on Judas and would love for you to be part of our team.

The Challenge For the Principal Lighting Artist role, you should have extensive experience in real-time lighting in Unreal Engine 4, including particular emphasis on in-game environmental and character lighting and a deep experience set in post-process tuning, color grading, and balancing an end-to-end HDR pipeline across a broader lighting team. As a Principal Lighting Artist, you will work closely with Creative and Art Direction, Design, and Tech as a key driver in maintaining the technical and aesthetic bar for lighting in Judas and ensuring a gameplay experience that is both beautiful and cohesive from start to end. For the unique visual identity of Judas, this also includes executing on a unique, dramatic stylization to lighting of the world, while retaining rich credibility and consistency through an expert understanding of a ‘physically plausible’ balance of lighting exposure, illumination and emissive intensities.

What You’ll Take On:

• Play a key role in pushing the visual and technical quality bar for lighting and helping troubleshoot any scalability and quality in execution across a broader lighting team.
• Where needed, help diagnosis and prove out targeted refinements to the technical pipeline and custom tool set for lighting on Judas, including proactive and collaborative engagement with Art Leadership, Tools and Graphics Engineering, Tech art to identify areas for quality, efficiency, or performance gains.
• As a Principal Lighting Artist, you are expected to help uphold the highest standards of aesthetic and technical quality of your own work, and leverage your expertise to identify opportunities for both visual and technical quality improvements across the project and effectively pitch to project leadership

What You Bring:

• Established experience in the game industry as a Senior to Principal Lighting Artist, preferably on larger, complex productions
• Extensive experience in lighting for real-time gameplay. You should be adept at not only crafting stunning scenes, but also leverage a deep understanding of the gameplay experience to create lighting compositions that effectively lead the player’s eye through traversal and combat gameplay, and communicate deliberate emotions in tune with the story
• Expert eye for value, color, composition and crafting deliberate visual hierarchy reads (focus direction, small-medium-large shape balance, ‘80/20 rule’)
• Proficient art and technical experience within Unreal (Unreal 4 preferred) and technical experience in balancing game-spanning illumination and emissive standards for adaptive-exposure and HDR
• Familiarity with performance evaluation and optimization and experience working with Engineering and Tech Art to maintain best practice examples for the broader lighting team

Who You Are:

• Proactive problem solver that enjoys cross-department collaboration, asks engaging questions, and can thoughtfully pitch both creative and visual ideas, as well as technical and process improvements to benefit the quality and efficiency of the project
• For the Principal role, we are especially looking for individuals with experience and mindfulness towards both individual and team efficiency, and proven ability to work on more challenging cross-functional tasks with a very high degree of ambiguity and autonomy
• As a Principal Lighting Artist, you are expected to serve as a significantly positive force multiplier across the team, both sharing your expertise to mentor other Lighting Artists and to help them solve problems, as well as representing a model for proactive, supportive collaboration across all other departments of the studio

Great to Have:

• Passion for deeply narrative driven games, particularly First Person Shooters.
• Additional traditional art, lighting, or cinematography background
• Experience working effectively and collaboratively with a diverse mix of internal and distributed teams

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