Who We Are

Ghost Story Games is a self-publishing game development studio founded by Ken Levine (Creative Director of System Shock 2, Bioshock, and Bioshock Infinite) and former Irrational Games developers. The studio’s mission is to create narrative-driven experiences rooted in immersive world building and gameplay.

The Challenge

For the remote Principal Lighting Artist role, you should have extensive experience in real-time lighting in Unreal Engine 4, including particular emphasis on in-game environmental and character lighting and a deep experience set in post-process tuning, color grading, and balancing an end-to-end HDR pipeline across a broader lighting team.

As a Principal Lighting Artist, you will work closely with Creative and Art Direction, Design, and Tech as a key driver in maintaining the technical and aesthetic bar for lighting in Judas and ensuring a gameplay experience that is both beautiful and cohesive from start to end. For the unique visual identity of Judas, this also includes executing on a unique, dramatic stylization to lighting of the world, while retaining rich credibility and consistency through an expert understanding of a ‘physically plausible’ balance of lighting exposure, illumination and emissive intensities.

What You’ll Take On

Play a key role in pushing the visual and technical quality bar for lighting and helping troubleshoot any scalability and quality in execution across a broader lighting team.
Where needed, help diagnosis and prove out targeted refinements to the technical pipeline and custom tool set for lighting on Judas, including proactive and collaborative engagement with Art Leadership, Tools and Graphics Engineering, Tech art to identify areas for quality, efficiency, or performance gains.
As a Principal Lighting Artist, you are expected to help uphold the highest standards of aesthetic and technical quality of your own work, and leverage your expertise to identify opportunities for both visual and technical quality improvements across the project and effectively pitch to project leadership

What You Bring

Established experience in the game industry as a Senior to Principal Lighting Artist, preferably on larger, complex productions
Extensive experience in lighting for real-time gameplay. You should be adept at not only crafting stunning scenes, but also leverage a deep understanding of the gameplay experience to create lighting compositions that effectively lead the player’s eye through traversal and combat gameplay, and communicate deliberate emotions in tune with the story
Expert eye for value, color, composition and crafting deliberate visual hierarchy reads (focus direction, small-medium-large shape balance, ‘80/20 rule’)
Proficient art and technical experience within Unreal (Unreal 4 preferred) and technical experience in balancing game-spanning illumination and emissive standards for adaptive-exposure and HDR
Familiarity with performance evaluation and optimization and experience working with Engineering and Tech Art to maintain best practice examples for the broader lighting team

Who You Are

Proactive problem solver that enjoys cross-department collaboration, asks engaging questions, and can thoughtfully pitch both creative and visual ideas, as well as technical and process improvements to benefit the quality and efficiency of the project
For the Principal role, we are especially looking for individuals with experience and mindfulness towards both individual and team efficiency, and proven ability to work on more challenging cross-functional tasks with a very high degree of ambiguity and autonomy
As a Principal Lighting Artist, you are expected to serve as a significantly positive force multiplier across the team, both sharing your expertise to mentor other Lighting Artists and to help them solve problems, as well as representing a model for proactive, supportive collaboration across all other departments of the studio

Great to Have

Passion for deeply narrative driven games, particularly First Person Shooters.