Job Description
Senior / Lead Animation Programmer
Code CI Games Group Fully Remote
We have an exciting opportunity for an enthusiastic and proactive Senior / Lead Animation Programmer to join our busy studios and support driving our games forward as we experience exponential growth.
We usually respond within a week
CI Games is looking for an experienced and creative individual to join our team as a Senior / Lead Animation Programmer. You’ll be joining the team on an ambitious and original open world survival game with a horror thematic. We’re putting a unique twist on the formula, both in mechanics and the environmental challenges we set for the player. Visual quality is paramount, so we’re building in Unreal Engine 5.
A career at CI Games is about being part of a team working on some of the most creatively rewarding and ambitious projects to be found in any entertainment medium. You would be welcomed to a dedicated and inclusive environment where you can learn and collaborate with some of the most talented people in the industry.
Key Responsibilities:
- Develop large scale animation systems that are usable and extendable by other disciplines or sub-team members.
- Work with the Gameplay and Animation teams to ensure cohesion between the groups and optimise the pipeline for animation content to get into game/engine in a timely manner.
- Maintenance and optimization of systems to ensure they remain fit-for-purpose through introduction of new technologies and gaming hardware during development.
- General Animation System strategies and patterns that can be adopted by the Engineering team as a whole.
- R&D into new developments and technologies in areas such as Motion Matching, Control Rig, Optimizers and middleware (e.g. Maya/Motion-Builder/Unreal plugins, etc.), providing value propositions for their inclusion in our workflows.
- Interface with other discipline members to understand their usage patterns and requirements for Animations within gameplay (requirements capture), and help provide clear roadmaps for the delivery of support systems across the projects you are involved in.
- Guide and mentor other team members and help them to improve (e.g. code patterns, communication and methodology).
- Task scheduling. helping to ensure that work is done in an order that does not create too much re-work & churn and in line with any downstream dependencies (consumers) of that work.
- Systems reviews, providing input into architectures proposed for various systems that have an element of R&D and/or risk to performance (specifically for animation dependencies).
- Performance assessment, evaluating the relative skills and weaknesses of more junior team members.
Key Requirements:
Must have
- 5+ years experience in AA/AAA Games Studios
- 2+ shipped titles as Animation Programmer
- C++
- Unreal 4/5 Experience
- Character Animation Systems involving player mechanics such as Climb/Vault/Slide/Melee/Ranged combat, etc.
- Animation blueprint and animation graph programming experience with modern techniques such as function binding, property accesses etc.
- Knowledge on common warping techniques such as motion warping, distance matching, stride warping etc.
- Knowledge on IK systems
- Knowledge on optimization techniques for skeletal meshes and animation systems on Unreal Engine
Good to have
- Motion Matching (or similar DB tech)
- Motion Warping (or similar tech)
- Hands-on experience with modular animation systems based on Control Rig
- Experience with first person locomotion/camera systems
- Knowledge on profiling animation thread and finding bottlenecks with Unreal Insights
- Hands-on experience with Gameplay Ability System to create replicated animation systems
- Basic knowledge on animation content pipelines