Senior Art Director - SLOTS - USA
Posted 2 days agoUnited StatesAttractive & competitive packageJob Reference: 37151
Outstanding opportunity to join this award-winning team of Slots game creators who are looking to grow so that we can release even more transformative experiences to the millions of players that enjoy our games every day. Experienced industry veterans will understand that producing blockbuster titles is no easy feat, requiring an obsessive eye for every detail including the game design, mathematics, and artwork.
That’s where you would come in: we’re looking for a superstar art and design leader who can work with our team to take game concepts, breathe life into them, and help turn them into hits.
If you’re able to expertly communicate your vision, deliver incredible art yourself, inspire top design personnel, and work tireless to build games in service of entertaining our players, you’ll fit right in.
Reporting to the VP of Game Production and working closely with everyone involved in building a game, this is a hands-on role that can be on the ground with the team or based remotely.
Core Responsibilities
That’s where you would come in: we’re looking for a superstar art and design leader who can work with our team to take game concepts, breathe life into them, and help turn them into hits.
If you’re able to expertly communicate your vision, deliver incredible art yourself, inspire top design personnel, and work tireless to build games in service of entertaining our players, you’ll fit right in.
Reporting to the VP of Game Production and working closely with everyone involved in building a game, this is a hands-on role that can be on the ground with the team or based remotely.
Core Responsibilities
- Work closely with the game production team to help define, conceptualise and iterate new game visions. This will include participating in design reviews, team meetings, and brainstorming sessions.
- Lead new game creative from start to finish. This will be particularly heavy on the conceptual development at the beginning.
- Present concepts clearly, concisely, and effectively to the team and to stakeholders.
- Execute upon concepts and established visions for games. This means both creating art assets yourself (particularly when communicating what you expect for output from teams) and coordinating with teams, agencies, consultants, firms, and designers to deliver assets for development.
- Prepare tidy, thoughtful, and well-structured source files for development and supervise their implementation to ensure they are delivered according to the original vision.
- Provide quality control over design outputs and production.
- Where possible, take new design solutions and bring them to life by creating prototypes. Those will be used to get a sense of how they will function in practice, help solve animation and interaction sequences and foster critical fine-tuning feedback from stakeholders. While static images give a great impression of the functionality, seeing it in action is even more valuable.
- Oversee deliverables, timelines and budgets.
- Be the point of contact for liaising with external suppliers.
- Assist the teams with questions about the designs and to help guide the specifications.
- Adjust designs based on feedback from stakeholders or from broader technical challenges, constraints, or limitations that may arise during the production process.
- Feedback on other proposed designs and requirements within the team, particularly in cases where it may affect the dependencies and connected interaction design.
- Document new controls and designs so that other team members (or other teams) clearly understand the design decisions and how to use, implement, or maintain the outputs.
- Update design systems and common controls where necessary to ensure that iterations are then fully documented, updated, and usable by the rest of the team.
- Define and evolve our game design language to weave consistence and game familiarity throughout our universe of titles while still giving us enough flexibility to try new things.
- Discover how to incorporate elements of our branding into games or how our design language can become an intrinsic element of our corporate branding strategy.
- Thoughtfully consider how games fit into the broader design language of the business and how an individual game’s design language may extend to sequels or series, particularly premier titles.
- Develop creative programs and design concepts that meet the business objectives of the organization and that advance our brand and proposition strategy.
- Understand what our competitors are doing differently and to help us identify elements that we may want to incorporate.
- Work to streamline our game design pipeline to reliably deliver high-quality, pixel-perfect assets at pace.
- Evaluate technologies that can help augment our design pipelines.
- Keep an eye on broader design trends and tools, especially within the gaming and entertainment spaces, to ensure that we are keeping up with best design practices and exceeding customer expectations.
- Provide thoughtful, considered feedback on the overall roadmap and design strategy.
- You must have worked in an art direction capacity for designing real money gaming slots. The more projects you can demonstrate, the better.
- You must have led art projects that have shipped AAA products for one or more major land-based slot manufacturers. Be prepared to discuss your roles in those projects and how you set the vision and shaped the final product.
- You must have a clear understanding and respect for our players, ideally knowing what they like, what they’re looking for, and how to give them more of the things they love. This should come from experience having developed a substantial body of work.
- You must be able to design. Although this is a leadership role that will be working with orchestrating different teams, you will also need to produce visual assets and designs that directly illustrate your vision and expected execution for products.
- You must be completely proficient with popular vector and bitmap design tools.
- You must be extremely comfortable working with game designers and mathematicians to visually develop conceptual mechanics and present them to players in a way that’s simple and easy to grasp.
- You must know how to hire, grow, and lead a team of exceptional design talent. Leadership is expected to be predominantly design-led rather than management-led.
- You must be familiar with hierarchical game structures and communicating excitement, anticipation, and relative value in a way that is easily understood by the player.
- You must be able to work with a wide variety of art styles, even if they are not your personal design style or preference. This is particularly important when working with valuable existing intellectual property that needs to stay true to the original.
- You must understand technical constraints and creatively work around them when necessary. Although our approach is to design the dream and figure out how to deliver it, there may be practical considerations that you should intrinsically understand.
- You should ideally be comfortable with prototyping more complex concepts to curb development time and reduce the risk of delivering designs that aren’t practical.
- Having the ability to delve into graphic design, motion graphics, animation, or video outside of product and UI design is a plus.
- Ideally you will have some technical background or knowledge. Understanding how developers build the interfaces and the challenges they face is tremendously valuable when designing games.
- Stating the obvious: love slot games – to succeed in this role, you need a passion and respect for the product you’re building.
- Take ownership of your creative deliveries as if they were for your own company. This includes exuding a startup mentality where you are working to constantly ship great product.
- Be exceptionally well-organised and structured with your time. There are going to be a lot of moving parts to this role so you must bring method and structure to your approach, particularly when you consider that we have many game titles in parallel pipelines.
- Be extremely creative and thrive in an ultra-creative environment – your role is to bring life to games and rally teams around that vision.
- Adapt quickly to different teams, different types of teams (internal versus external), working styles, and art styles.
- Be ready to adopt a mobile-first mentality and understand how to design games for small form-factor designs.
- Be obsessed with details. Creating amazing player experiences means every single detail matters. In a such a highly competitive industry, all these small aspects can stack up to make all the difference.
- Bring an infectious design mentality that the team can adopt and easily work with.
- Take critical feedback well. A lot of different stakeholders are going to be looking at the designs and prototypes and providing their input – this is a critical part of the collaboration process. Knowing how to accept and act on feedback is vital to this role.
- Discuss constructively and diplomatically. Having many different views means that we won’t always agree – but we need to focus on collaborating solutions that deliver optimal outcomes for our customers. You will also be providing feedback to different individuals and teams to take designs forward and that needs to be done well to keep things moving.
- Be an expert communicator both visually and verbally. Your designs and prototypes should nearly speak for themselves; however, you still need to be able to walk different audiences through them in detail. For example, explaining them to stakeholders versus relaying the details to development.
- Exude transparency, openness, and objectivity. We’re here to build great games and need to collaborate effectively.
- Thrive in a fast-paced environment and be able to work to very tight deadlines. We work to visualise things quickly and make decisions to push the business forward.
- Speak English natively or be completely fluent.
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