Art Director job

Art Director | Maxis Texas

Maxis Texas, EA's newest Maxis studio, is looking for a visionary Art Director to lead our art team in the creation of a new, unannounced title. We're looking for candidates with a unique vision and the ability to promote that vision, providing stunning visuals at the highest levels of execution.

At Maxis we're pushing the boundaries on every front, so you'll get a chance to stretch beyond your comfort zone and learn while you contribute. Our team culture is collaborative and we expect everyone to think like game makers and approach development with a Player First perspective.

You'll report to our Senior Producer and your responsibilities will include:

• Collaborate and develop a cohesive aesthetic vision for our bold, new project
• Team up with the Creative Director, Tech Leadership, and Production to accomplish key milestones
• Extend the game's aesthetic vision beyond core game visuals to cohesively support UI/UX, Live Services and marketing considerations
• Understand and navigate technical constraints to produce stunning results on every platform
• Create and maintain style guides and high-level documentation
• Nurture the development and well-being of the art team
• Train artists to meet style guide parameters and iterate to improve results, pipelines and processes
• Develop partnerships with external outsourcing partners to ensure assets hit style, schedule, technical and quality targets
• Assemble requirements for the product and create an art plan that supports them
• Align with producers ito hit sprints and milestones
• Develop art team production best practices in collaboration with development directors

Qualifications

• Accomplished CG artist with a minimum of 10 years experience in game development and at least one shipped title as a video game art director
• A deep understanding of all aspects of contemporary 3D game development: concept art, character modeling, prop modeling, environment modeling, lighting, animation, visual effects and user-interface design.
• Experienced at establishing art vision and guidelines, preferable on new IPs
• Accomplished in leading and inspiring teams of artists and in delivering appropriate feedback as the team executes through pre-production, production and as a continually evolving live service
• Experienced in working with team partners to create a content plan and backlog as well as a developing a hiring ramp and timeline required to execute
• Prior experience ramping up and working effectively with external development partners
• Proven solutions-orientation and prototyping ability
• Strong sense of composition, lighting, form and palette
• Deep, demonstrated passion for game development and game art

Bonus

• Experience developing games for the mobile market
• Experience in developing 2D and 3D assets for monetized live service games