Fire Hose Games is the Boston-based (but currently fully-remote) independent game development studio behind titles such as Techtonica, Go Home Dinosaurs, Catlateral Damage, and 20XX. We pay good salaries and our generous benefits package includes health care, dental, unlimited vacation/sick time, 401(k) with matching, excellent maternity/paternity leave, and flexible work hours. Fire Hose hasn’t crunched in years and we don’t intend to start. Our company culture is inclusive, supportive, and fun. We strongly encourage applicants with diverse backgrounds and voices to apply, and consider relevant experience in all its forms. We hope to hear from you!

For more info, visit https://www.firehosegames.com/

Fire Hose Games is looking for an experienced Technical Artist to join our team working on Techtonica, our anticipated upcoming release! Our studio is fully-remote, and successful candidates may work from anywhere, provided they are able to sync with the U.S. Eastern time zone during core team hours.

As our tech artist, you’ll serve as both interpreter and problem-solver for our artists and engineers, developing the tools and pipelines needed to make sure that our models, animations, and textures deliver rich and immersive visuals without breaking the performance budget. In particular, you will take the lead on developing and implementing our in-game VFX. 

DEI is important to us, and candidates from diverse backgrounds are strongly encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities:

• Implement and optimize custom shaders for in-game content to run on PC and consoles
• Collaborate with art and design teams to create a wide variety of VFX
• Manage the graphics performance budget and help create guidelines for content, including materials, shaders, post-processing, models, lighting, and animations
• Set and monitor benchmarks, making sure that assets can be rendered without compromising the artistic vision on the one hand or busting the memory budget on the other
• Assist developers from all disciplines with Unity3D, assessing or creating new tools as needed to improve workflows and pipelines
• Create high-quality particle effects and textures

• Significant professional experience with creating VFX for commercial video games, including at least one shipped title
• Strong understanding of Unity's Particle System and Shader API (experience with visual scripting tools like Amplify and Shadergraph counts)
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Comfortable working closely with other disciplines, and shepherding/refining good ideas regardless of where they originate
• Demonstrated proficiency in technical problem solving and optimization when it comes to visual effects
• Solid understanding of technical workflows related to each of the major art disciplines: lighting, rendering, shaders, post-processing, particle systems, animation, UI, and more

Preferences:

• Proficiency with at least one graphics debugging tool (RenderDoc, Pix, console-specific, etc.)
• Experience with optimizing rendering performance (reducing batches, draw calls, optimizing shaders, etc.)
• Knowledge of Unity profiling tools
• Experience with porting between PC and different consoles
• Familiarity with the following in Unity:
  • Standard render pipeline
  • Indirect GPU instancing
  • Billboard imposters
  • Deferred rendering
• Familiarity with marching cube voxel terrain
• Comfortable with visual concepting and prototyping VFX in Unity
• Experience with improving art pipelines and workflows for artists using Maya, Blender, Substance and Unity

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.