Creature (and Gameplay) Programmer

We're looking for a programmer who can help us bring our creatures to life.

Our new game is about a field biologist interacting with a wide variety of mundane and fantastical creatures. We're trying to create moments that echo the mesmerizing familiarity and strangeness of real life encounters with wild animals. Like a grub crawling on a hand, a starfish waving its arms, or a lizard emerging from its shell but filtered through an aesthetic that includes classic fairytales, Jim Henson, and Junji Ito.

Your role will be finding programmatic ways to help our creatures feel unsettlingly alive. That's likely to include a mix of animation, physics, AI, and gameplay programming. It's OK if you don't have direct experience in all these areas but you should have a background that includes technically complex, player-facing systems.

This might be a good fit for you if you'd enjoy:

Analyzing real animal movement and behavior to figure out ways to improve our creatures' sense of liveliness.
Creating robust Control Rigs that are responsive to player input, eg being poked with a pencil.
Exploring Unreal's procedural VFX systems including Grooms and Chaos Flesh. Our goal is to create characters that can playfully respond to perturbation like Ryan Corneil's Unreal puppets.
Working with designers on gameplay prototypes, eg building a prehensile tongue that can "crawl" around the environment in a suitably stretchy, squishy way.
Collaborating with character artists and animators on building and polishing our creatures.

Must haves

4+ years of experience as a professional game developer
Strong background in C++
Comfortable with vector math and basic physics

Nice to haves

Experience with Unreal
An interest in science and biology
An interest in procedural animation

This role could be fully remote or you can join us in Los Angeles if you'd like.

If you think you'd be a good fit, please contact us.