Job Description
Role Summary
We are now searching for a Visual Development Lead / Art Director to establish and steer the visual identity of a stylized third-person action-adventure game. This is a hands-on direction role, not a traditional large-team management role and not a pure concept-art seat. The right person can conceive, select, communicate, and guide a distinctive visual direction that is appealing, readable in gameplay, technically reasonable, and achievable by a small senior team.
They should be comfortable challenging direction when needed, but must bring fast viable alternatives that can earn buy-in. The priority is visual authorship plus production judgment: taste, clarity, and the ability to help the team execute.
Core Responsibilities
- Establish, refine, and communicate a distinctive visual identity that the team can actually build.
- Create, direct, or guide visual development across environments, characters, animation, lighting, atmosphere, VFX, and world presentation.
- Communicate direction through the fastest useful medium: drawings, paintovers, thumbnails, reference boards, 3D blockouts, lighting studies, engine mockups, or style guides.
- Guide a small senior art team with clear, practical, actionable feedback while preserving coherent style.
- Support both fast movement readability and slower exploration; think about camera, traversal, scale, and player attention.
- Work with project leadership to keep art direction within scope, performance, and production realities.
- Identify when a direction is too expensive, unclear, generic, visually noisy, or difficult to execute — and propose a better path.
If this role is of interest then please do apply here and/or send me a copy of your CV to michael@levelupgaming.io and I will review and get back to you as quickly as possible.