About the role
Job Overview
Prismatic Studios is a team of creators shaping the future of interactive technology. The studio works across games and interactive experiences, tackling technical challenges and delivering projects for clients globally. The team values creativity, collaboration, and growth, operating out of Auckland, New Zealand, with some roles open to remote candidates within New Zealand.
3D Animator (Unannounced Internal IP)
Responsibilities
- Create high-quality character and creature animations for a melee action game.
- Animate a range of gameplay actions, movement, combat, and other character behaviours.
- Work closely with the Art Lead and development team to ensure animations fit the game’s visual style and gameplay requirements.
- Develop and iterate on animations based on feedback and gameplay testing.
- Prepare and implement animation assets for use in a real-time game environment.
- Help identify and resolve animation issues during development.
- Contribute to the development and refinement of the game’s animation pipeline and processes.
Requirements
- Prior experience as a 3D Animator within game development.
- Strong understanding of core animation principles.
- Experience creating character and creature animations for real-time games.
- Familiarity with modern 3D art and animation software (such as Blender, Maya, Houdini, or Unreal Engine).
- Strong portfolio demonstrating character and creature animation.
- Good understanding of how animation needs to be created and prepared for use in a real-time game.
- Ability to work collaboratively with artists, designers, and engineers.
- Strong communication skills and an ability to take feedback and iterate quickly.
Additional Valuable Skills
- Experience with Unreal Engine animation tools and pipelines.
- Experience with rigging and character setup.
- Experience creating melee combat animations.
- Experience working with motion capture and cleaning or editing mocap data.
- General 3D workflow understanding.
Compensation
- Contract Rate: NZD $32 – $41.50 / hr
3D Character Artist (Unannounced Internal IP)
Responsibilities
- Create high-quality 3D character assets for the game.
- Work across the character art pipeline, including high-poly and low-poly modelling, UVs, and texturing.
- Create characters that fit the game’s visual style and proportions.
- Work closely with the Art Lead to develop and refine character designs and visual direction.
- Create and refine textures using tools such as Substance Painter or Marmoset.
- Work closely with other artists to ensure characters integrate well with the wider art style and asset pipeline.
- Iterate on assets based on feedback from the Art Lead and wider development team.
- Help identify and resolve artistic and technical issues throughout the character creation process.
Requirements
- Experience as a 3D Character Artist, ideally within game development.
- Strong portfolio demonstrating high-quality 3D character art.
- Excellent understanding of human proportions and anatomy.
- Strong understanding of style, shape, and stylised proportions.
- Strong art fundamentals.
- Experience creating both high-poly and low-poly character assets.
- Experience with UV creation and optimisation.
- Experience with texturing tools such as Substance Painter or Marmoset.
- Experience with modern 3D software such as Blender, Maya, 3ds Max, or ZBrush.
- Understanding of the requirements of creating game-ready character assets.
- Ability to work collaboratively with artists, designers, and other members of the development team.
- Strong communication skills and an ability to take feedback and iterate quickly.
Additional Valuable Skills
- Experience with hand-painted style character art.
- Experience creating 3D assets outside of character art.
- Broader game-ready asset creation experience.
- Understanding of character rigging and setup.
- Experience with weight painting and skinning.
Compensation
- Contract Rate: NZD $32 – $41.50 / hr
VFX / Technical Artist (Unannounced Internal IP)
Responsibilities
- Create and implement real-time visual effects in Unreal Engine using Niagara.
- Develop materials and shaders to support the game’s visual style and gameplay.
- Explore and develop procedural workflows to improve the creation of game content (such as PCG).
- Contribute to lighting and other visual systems within Unreal Engine.
- Identify and solve artistic and technical challenges throughout development.
- Profile and optimise visual effects, materials, and other art systems to ensure they perform effectively in-game.
- Help develop and refine technical art workflows and processes as the project evolves.
- Support other members of the art team with technical problem-solving where required.
Requirements
- Strong experience working with Unreal Engine.
- Experience creating real-time VFX using Niagara.
- Strong understanding of materials and shaders.
- Experience with Unreal Engine PCG or similar procedural systems.
- Experience with lighting within a real-time game environment.
- Understanding of procedural workflows, such as Houdini, PCG, procedural Blender workflows, or similar tools.
- Good understanding of optimisation and the performance requirements of real-time content.
- Ability to work across both the artistic and technical aspects of game development.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills.
- Ability to take direction, solve problems independently, and iterate on solutions.
Additional Valuable Skills
- 3D modelling experience or broader 3D art experience.
- Strong general art fundamentals.
Compensation
- Contract Rate: NZD $40 – $50.50 / hr
Technical Level Artist
Responsibilities
- Build and polish high-quality game environments in Unreal Engine from blockout through to final-quality level art.
- Create high-quality, game-ready environment assets.
- Level asset placement, environment composition, set dressing and visual polish.
- Use Unreal Engine profiling and debugging tools to identify and resolve environment performance bottlenecks.
- Profile and troubleshoot GPU, CPU, memory and rendering performance issues, optimising levels and environment content for PC and mobile hardware.
- Optimise draw calls, shader complexity, overdraw, visibility, culling, level streaming and runtime asset usage.
- Implement and optimise World Partition and other level streaming workflows.
- Optimise Static Meshes, LODs, collision, materials, textures and other environment assets.
- Identify and resolve technical art issues affecting level quality or performance.
- Contribute to art pipelines, technical standards and best practices.
Requirements
- 2+ years of professional experience as a Level Artist, Environment Artist, Technical Artist, or similar role.
- Strong professional experience using Unreal Engine in game development.
- Strong experience creating and polishing game environments in Unreal Engine.
- Strong understanding of level art, environment composition, set dressing and visual storytelling.
- Proven ability to take environments from blockout through to final-quality level art.
- Strong understanding of Unreal Engine performance and optimisation.
- Experience profiling and optimising GPU, CPU, memory and rendering performance.
- Strong understanding of draw calls, shader complexity, overdraw, visibility, culling and level streaming.
- Experience with World Partition and streaming workflows.
- Experience with material and shader optimisation.
- Understanding of lighting and shadow performance.
- Understanding of PC versus mobile performance limitations and scalability requirements.
- Ability to troubleshoot technical art and performance issues within Unreal Engine.
- Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate within multidisciplinary teams.
- Self-driven, organised and capable of independently managing workload.
Additional Valuable Skills
- Chinese language proficiency.
Compensation
- Contract Rate: NZD $40 – $60 / hr
Senior Animator
Responsibilities
- Clean up and polish full-body motion capture performances to production-ready quality.
- Clean up and refine facial motion capture, including expressions, lip-sync, mouth shapes, eye movement, blinking and common capture artifacts.
- Combine full-body and facial motion capture into believable and consistent character performances.
- Create and refine gameplay animation, including locomotion, walks, runs, sprints, starts, stops, turns, pivots and transitions.
- Identify and correct common mocap issues including foot sliding, incorrect foot contacts, jitter, unnatural weight transfer and retargeting artifacts.
- Retarget animation across different character rigs and proportions.
- Implement and validate character animation within Unreal Engine.
- Review animation quality in-engine and make adjustments based on real-time playback and gameplay requirements.
- Work with animation tools and pipelines to prepare and maintain production-ready animation libraries.
- Contribute to the development and improvement of animation workflows and best practices.
- Provide guidance and feedback to other artists where required.
Requirements
- 4+ years of professional experience as an Animator or similar role.
- Strong professional experience with 3D character animation, preferably using Maya.
- Strong experience with full-body motion capture cleanup and polishing.
- Experience with facial motion capture cleanup and polishing.
- Strong understanding of character animation fundamentals, including body mechanics, timing, weight, balance, momentum and natural human movement.
- Experience with gameplay locomotion animation and transitions.
- Experience working with Unreal Engine character animation or similar real-time game animation pipelines.
- Familiarity with Maya HumanIK (HIK), MotionBuilder or comparable animation and retargeting workflows.
- Strong understanding of animation retargeting and working across different character rigs and proportions.
- Ability to identify and correct common motion capture and retargeting issues.
- Ability to evaluate and refine animation quality within Unreal Engine, not only within Maya.
- Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate within multidisciplinary teams.
- Self-driven, organised and capable of independently managing workload.
Additional Valuable Skills
- Chinese language proficiency.
Compensation
- Contract Rate: NZD $40 – $58 / hr
Unreal Software Engineer (Unannounced Internal IP)
Responsibilities
- Design and develop gameplay features and systems in Unreal Engine.
- Develop and maintain core gameplay systems that are performant, scalable, and maintainable.
- Design and implement multiplayer and networked gameplay systems.
- Work with Unreal Engine networking, replication, RPCs, relevancy, and client/server architecture.
- Develop gameplay systems using the Gameplay Ability System (GAS), including Abilities, Attributes, Effects, and Gameplay Tags.
- Work closely with Game Designers to turn gameplay concepts and requirements into robust technical implementations.
- Diagnose and resolve technical issues, bugs, and performance bottlenecks.
- Profile and optimise CPU, GPU, memory, networking, and gameplay performance.
- Contribute to technical design and architectural decisions across the project.
- Maintain high code quality standards and participate in code reviews.
- Create and maintain technical documentation where required.
- Provide technical guidance and mentorship to other engineers.
Requirements
- 3+ years of professional game development experience, with significant experience using Unreal Engine.
- Strong expertise in C++ and Unreal Engine development.
- Strong understanding of Unreal Engine architecture, frameworks, and development practices.
- Proven experience designing and implementing complex gameplay systems.
- Strong understanding of gameplay programming and common game development patterns.
- Professional experience with Unreal Engine networking and multiplayer development.
- Strong understanding of replication, RPCs, client/server architecture, relevancy, and network performance.
- Experience working with the Unreal Engine Gameplay Ability System (GAS).
- Experience diagnosing and resolving complex technical and performance issues.
- Ability to profile and optimise Unreal Engine projects across CPU, GPU, memory, and networking.
- Strong understanding of source control systems such as Perforce.
- Familiarity with Agile development practices and tools such as Jira and Confluence.
- Strong communication and teamwork skills, with the ability to work effectively across multidisciplinary teams.
- Self-driven, detail-oriented, with strong problem-solving and time-management skills.
Compensation
- Salary/Contract Rate Range: NZD $80,000 – $100,000 or equivalent contract rate
Senior Unreal Software Engineer (Expression of Interest)
Responsibilities
- Design and develop features and systems using Unreal Engine and C++.
- Work with client teams to understand technical requirements and develop practical solutions.
- Take ownership of technical problems from investigation through to implementation and delivery.
- Develop gameplay, engine, networking, rendering, tools, or other systems depending on project requirements.
- Diagnose and resolve complex technical issues and bugs.
- Profile and optimise Unreal Engine projects across CPU, GPU, memory, networking, and other areas of performance.
- Investigate and resolve performance and stability issues in large or complex projects.
- Contribute to technical design and architectural decisions.
- Work with existing codebases and systems, including understanding and improving unfamiliar code.
- Maintain high standards of code quality and participate in code reviews.
- Work closely with artists, designers, technical artists, and other disciplines to implement and support features.
- Communicate technical issues and solutions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Contribute to technical documentation and development best practices.
- Provide technical guidance and mentorship to other engineers.
Requirements
- 5+ years of professional game development experience, with significant experience using Unreal Engine.
- Strong C++ programming skills and professional Unreal Engine development experience.
- Strong understanding of Unreal Engine architecture, frameworks, and development practices.
- Proven experience designing and implementing complex, maintainable, and performant systems.
- Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, debugging, and system design.
- Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to investigate complex technical issues independently.
- Experience profiling and optimising Unreal Engine projects.
- Ability to work effectively within an existing codebase and understand unfamiliar systems.
- Strong understanding of source control systems such as Perforce or Git.
- Experience working within Agile development environments and tools such as Jira and Confluence.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively with clients and multidisciplinary development teams.
- Self-driven, organised, and capable of managing workload across multiple priorities.
Additional Valuable Skills
- Chinese language proficiency.
Compensation
- Salary/Contract Rate Range: Negotiable based on experience