2K Games is looking for talented people who are passionate about games to fill the following roles in its Northern California office in Novato.

If you would like to apply, please send your CV (and sample code or demo reel when appropriate) to Brooke Grabrian: brooke.grabrian@2kgames.com

The Bioshock 2 team at 2K Marin is looking for someone with both the technical chops and audiovisual storytelling sense to blend animation, audio, FX and environment art in the unique style of narrative that captivated players in the original Bioshock. You'll work closely with storyboard artists and creative leads to define the structure of in-game narrative sequences, pull in resources from several departments to make it happen, and work with level designers and architects to put it into its full context.

Job Responsibilities:

• Create in-game cinematic and scripted events using the Unreal Editor and our proprietary scripting system
• Interpret storyboards and scripts into effective real-time narrative moments
• Co-ordinate with animators, fx artists, level designers and environment artists to integrate all cinematic elements
• Co-ordinate with design to hook up all narrative and scripted moments into level design
• Present scripted events in bi-weekly "dailies".
• Organize complicated scenes to produce a compelling end result
• Collaborate with directors and leads to achieve story and game play goals

Required Skills:

• Unreal Editor experience
• Level scripting experience
• Experience with scene layout
• Environment decoration and lighting experience
• Fluent with cinematic theory and language
• Ability to take direction well
• Ability to take on large and complex tasks and self-manage on time delivery of those tasks.
• Able to respond elegantly to difficult creative changes, often late in the process
• Self-motivated towards solving creative problems
• Able to communicate animation concepts with other artists visually using quick thumbnail sketches or acting

Extra Credit:

• Experience with editing
• Experience creating animation
• Experience with Havok
• Fluency with 3D Studio Max and/or Photoshop
• 3+ years game and/or film industry experience
• Strong 2D Animation skills
• Acting background
• Film background

Develop assigned segments of software products or for entire software products, from concept to release and for providing and/or maintaining the creative vision of the products.

Job Responsibilities:

• Work with members of the development staff to cultivate a game design from initial concept to a detailed design document.
• Assist with overseeing and managing internal and external resources to meet production schedules and maintains a coherent design throughout the entire development life cycle.
• Work closely with Producer to develop product budgets and schedules.
• Ensure adherence to schedules and budgets.
• Assist Producers in the direction of large, strategic products.
• Manage the testing process with internal QA teams.
• Assist with coordinating game release process with internal groups.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree preferred.
• 2+ years experience in internal or external game development.
• Previous experience in project management and production.
• Experience with AAA titles preferred.
• Ability to interface with all levels of the organization.

Skills:

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills and project management skills.
• Strong game design and creative problem solving skills.
• Adept at building relationships throughout the organization.
• Excellent organization and time-management skills.
• Ability to produce high quality results on time and within budget.
• Strong PC skills (MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc).

Does hearing insane super-junkies babbling incoherently down a dark scary hallway bring a smile to your face? Want to spend the good part of a year creating and supervising such things? If so, then you are the perfect fit for Team Bioshock! 2K Games award winning 2007 release "Bioshock" set the bar for its rich AI dialogue and engaging characters. Bioshock 2 is looking to do it again but we need your help to do it!

2K Marin is in need of a Dialogue Supervisor. This would be a contract position that would last approximately from January through August 2009.

Job Responsibilities:

• Supervise all dialogue recording sessions, either in-studio or remotely
• Edit and/or supervise editorial of all dialogue recordings
• Develop and/or supervise development of all processed dialogue (radios, recorded logs, etc)
• Supervise out-of-house dialogue contractors
• Implement all individual dialogue files into the game
• Work with Audio Lead to maintain a high benchmark in overall audio quality
• Work with Creative Director and Writers to make sure all dialogue needs are covered
• Work with AI team to make sure all AI dialogue is working properly
• Assist the Audio Team with any other audio creation/implementation as needed

Qualifications:

• Must have a great ear for dialogue and the know-how to make it sound natural in an interactive environment
• Must have worked in a Supervisory position for at least one title
• Must have experience as an audio dialogue editor/implementer on at least 5 titles
• Must have experience supervising dialogue recording sessions
• Must have good working knowledge of the FMOD audio tools
• Must work well in a team environment

Man, we are busy over here. We are creating the sequel to 2007’s Game of the Year – "Bioshock", and we have enlisted the creative help of other top-notch, creative teams to help us realize our complex, artistic vision. It’s enough already for us to figure out how to communicate our complicated, occasionally insane ideas to our own team of ridiculously talented painters, players and polygon pushers (no prima-donnas, though) – which is why we need you.

You need to have an art background, we can tell you that. You need to be able to draw a picture of a cityscape or a dog licking himself. You will sit in a room with a set of highly opinionated Directors and Leads while we rant and/or rave about environment art, character designs, props, animations, and more. You will have to distill the main points and visions from the hanging nebula of flapping limbs, cursing, rude-joking and incongruous example-giving into crystalline packets of information that will be unambiguously interpreted by our external art teams. You will have to be resourceful to communicate, often using your own drawings and paintovers or gathered reference imagery. You take notes (fast!) and you are an exemplary emailist with a compendious vocabulary. You should enjoy travel, because you will be visiting external developers.

Summary: Manage and direct external art teams ensuring continuity with internal development.

Job Responsibilities:

• Master the artistic language of the project as set by internal art leadership.
• Evangelize internal artistic vision to external teams.
• Ensure absolute parity between all internal and external art assets.
• Coalesce all internal art feedback from external art deliveries into detailed and illustrative paintovers, callouts, edits and approvals.
• Periodically visit external studios to ensure consistency and clarity of artistic decisions and review external implementation of art, animation, and interface design.
• Ensure quality assurance protocols for artwork.
• Develop and maintain art technical guideline documents.
• Create specification sheets for all external asset types.
• Take part in all internal art and animation reviews.
• Communicate the visual design and development of the project to external art teams through art specifications, style guides and discussions, including environmental design, character design, prop design, graphic design, lighting, special effects, and reference material.
• Manage a team of internal modelers supporting level creation.
• Review deliveries of environment, character and level art with leads and communicate top-level artistic direction to external developers
• Ensure that all external aesthetic choices work in harmony with the game design.

Qualifications:

• Experience as art director or art manager for a shipped game, preferably on a next-gen console.
• 5+ years professional experience in 2D and 3D art production.
• Demonstrated ability to work with a high degree of self-direction.
• Ability to work collaboratively with both external and internal teams, under tight deadlines and strict technical constraints.

Skills:

• Excellent artistic, verbal and technical writing skills.
• Strong art skills, both 2D and 3D. Experience with Photoshop, 3ds Max and Unreal Engine desirable.
• Ability to breakdown complicated goals into detailed, digestible and clear feedback.
• Highly detail-oriented and able to multi-task effectively.
• Strong traditional art skills highly desired.
• Highly collaborative and able to communicate gracefully.
• Proven management and external team-building skills.

You've probably been drawing since you can remember…perhaps you’re a painter, maybe you're even an eccentric sculptor wearing an old flight-suit covered in plaster, we don't know. What we do know is that at some point you realized that video games became the most promising form of creative expression you could imagine. What could be better than playing a key role in architecting entire 3D worlds for an audience to explore filled with characters whose costumes and very personalities you have helped create?

You like to communicate your visions with pictures, and you have a team of the industry's best environment artists, character modelers and animators waiting to be set in motion like a wound clockwork. You love it when someone asks you "what should this look like?" You are familiar with the intricacies of creating art for real time, 3D worlds, but your ideas about games are frequently unorthodox, and occasionally esoteric. Does this sound like you?

Job Responsibilities:

• Interpret the Creative Director’s vision for the project into a compelling, cohesive and coherent visual language.
• Set artistic direction and oversee its implementation in art, animation, and interface design.
• Develop and ensure quality assurance protocols for artwork.
• Develop and maintain a comprehensive art bible for the project.
• Review and approve artists’ work and preside over all art/content reviews.
• Set and approve the visual design and content for the project, ensuring that the artistic style and content are innovative, appropriate, and consistent.
• Oversee the visual development of the project, encouraging input from team members but making final decisions on the visual quality, style, and mood of assets.
• Communicate the visual design and development of the project to the art team and production through art specifications, style guides and discussions, including environmental design, character design, prop design, graphic design, lighting, special effects, and reference material.
• Visually direct and mentor the artists on the team.
• Work closely with the Lead Artist and Lead Animator to maximize aesthetic innovation, quality, and art resources, while assuring adherence to budget constraints.
• Direct and contribute to the creation, definition, and development of character designs, background drawings, and other art aspects of games.
• Ensure that all aesthetic choices work in harmony with the game design.
• Maintain and communicate a strong knowledge of innovative game production technologies and the capabilities/limitations of these technologies as they relate to project goals.

Qualifications:

• Art directed a shipped game, preferably on a next-gen console.
• 5+ years professional experience in 2D and 3D art production.
• Demonstrated ability to work with a high degree of self-direction.
• Ability to work in a collaborative team setting, under tight deadlines and strict technical constraints.

Skills:

• Excellent skills with Photoshop and/or Painter. Experience with 3D Studio Max, Maya, or the Unreal Engine highly preferable.
• Broad traditional art skills in the areas of color theory, composition, form and graphic design.
• Highly collaborative and able to communicate gracefully both visually and verbally.
• Proven management and team-building skills.
• Extensive knowledge of gaming industry art styles, technology and tools.

Job Responsibilities:

• Complete daily smoke tests in a timely manner
• Quickly run through the whole game to check the stability of a build
• Identify defects, follow test plans, and verify fixes
• Enter clear and concise bugs into bug tracking database
• Test fixes for programmers and designers
• Reproduce issues for programmers and designers
• Assist the Marketing department by taking screenshots and video capturing
• Available to work OT and weekends when necessary
• Work closely with other QA members
• Able to work under pressure and changing demands
• Must be dependable and punctual

Technical Skills / Experience:

• 1-2 years of QA experience
• Strong verbal and written communication skills
• Working knowledge of current video game console platforms and related hardware
• Experience using Windows, Word, and Excel
• Familiarity with BioShock

Desired Skills:

• UnrealEd experience
• PS3/360 dev kit experience
• Wiki editing
• Test Track
• Jira

If you made the most awesome flip-books when you were a kid and were undeterred by the unimaginative people who told you that you could never do that for a living, but you continued to refine them until they intersected with computers and you actually started to pay the rent, you might be just who we're looking for. As an animator with 2K Marin, you would be responsible for animating characters using a combination of keyframe animation and motion capture editing. You will work with our Lead Animator to figure out how best to tackle thousands of animations and transitions for multiple in-game characters. Additionally, you will interpret storyboards and animate them for action-packed and emotionally engaging narrative cut-scenes. You will probably also make faces and do silly walks in front of a mirror.

Job Responsibilities:

• Create in-game physical animation
• Create performance animation for cut scenes
• Interpret storyboards and produce animatics
• Assist Lead Animator in directing motion-capture sessions
• Create keyframe animation
• Clean-up and edit motion capture data
• Organize complicated sets of animation data
• Rig characters for animation
• Collaborate with Concept Artist and Character Modelers

Required Skills:

• 3D character animation experience
• Experience with FK/IK switching, constraints, and facial rigs
• Mesh skinning/vertex weighting experience
• Ability to collaborate with peer-level Character Modelers and Game Designers
• Ability to take direction well
• Able to respond elegantly to difficult creative changes, often late in the process
• Self-motivated towards solving creative problems
• Able to communicate animation concepts with other artists visually using quick thumbnail sketches or acting

Extra Credit:

• Experience creating storyboards
• Experience editing motion-capture animation data
• Experience with the Unreal Engine
• Experience with Havok
• Fluency with 3D Studio Max and Photoshop
• Fluency with Maxscript and facial rigging
• 2+ years game industry experience
• Strong 2D Animation skills
• Acting background
• Fine Art background
• Martial Arts experience

Did you wile away your "misspent" youth doing custom mods of action figures? Were you modeling sinewy quadriceps with Sculpy while your buddies were content to create bad Mr. Bill replicas with Play-Doh? Now, as a fully realized superhero of character modeling, do you deftly defy the dastardly domain known as the… Uncanny Valley? As senior character modeler with 2K Marin, you will be responsible for modeling and texturing the tortured characters of Bioshock 2 using a combination of high res modeling and shading tools. That, and you'll get to fill your desk with lovingly placed vignettes of limited edition Sideshow Collectibles.

Job Responsibilities:

• Create high resolution and game resolution 3d character models
• Create character textures and shaders
• Create weapons and character related props
• Mentor team members
• Organize model and texture libraries
• Collaborate with the art director, lead animator and character team

Required Skills

• Extremely strong modeling skills, preferably in 3ds Max
• Experience with Zbrush and/or Mudbox
• Experience creating high resolution textures in Photoshop
• Shipped next-gen games as a character modeler
• Deep understanding of anatomy
• Ability to take on large and complex tasks and self-manage on time delivery of those tasks.
• Able to respond elegantly to difficult creative changes, often late in the process
• Self-motivated towards solving creative problems
• Able to communicate modeling concepts with other artists visually using quick thumbnail sketches or acting

Extra Credit

• Experience creating practical models and maquettes
• Experience creating blend shapes/morph targets
• Experience with the Unreal Engine
• Experience with Havok
• 5+ years game and/or film industry experience
• Fine Art background
• Martial Arts experience

Love. It is a primal, uncultured energy, shaping you in ways that reason can't touch. Kind of a gushy, melodramatic word to paint on a NOW HIRING sign, right?

Sure - but for you, this is an emotional science. Games have changed you, and now you're just itching to return the favor. Maybe the raw potential of simulated experience fascinated you, or the rules and dynamics of play managed to reach into your skull and grab hold in ways that other media couldn't. However the mark was made, you've been a game designer ever since.

But all love has a price. Games make you a little crazy from time to time, because you know how much better they could be. We know how you feel. Come play with us.

Responsibilities:

• Primary ownership for the design, prototyping and fostering of one or more core gameplay systems, including player mechanics, world simulation and / or AI
• Lead, coordinate and participate in collaborative, interdisciplinary sub-teams to implement and balance gameplay features from initial design to final polish
• Author, revise and provide feedback on internal design documentation, including feature specifications and implementation guides
• Collaborate with the design team to incorporate systems into level gameplay and maintain overall balance between multiple gameplay systems
• Continually iterate, balance and tune features and gameplay based on feedback from design leads, QA and playtesting

Qualifications:

Education / Experience:

• 3+ Years of game development experience, ideally in a systems design capacity
• Previous experience with gameplay scripting or programming languages
• At least one shipped title in the current generation of consoles

Skills:

• Superb written and oral communication skills
• Strong ability to deconstruct high level gameplay systems and creative direction into specific technical details, features and tasks
• Ability to work in highly collaborative, interdisciplinary, iterative environment, while delivering under deadlines and time constraints
• Exhaustive knowledge of competitive products and industry trends
• Ability to learn new software tools and technologies. Previous experience with Unreal a plus.

Got what it takes to produce a cutting-edge AAA title? Be part of our passionate team and strive for excellence.

2K Games seeks the talents of a seasoned and passionate programmer who enjoys a collaborative and creative work environment and is looking to work with like minded professionals to create a truly amazing game.

Summary: Develop, write, implement, and debug code for new and upgraded software products.

Job Responsibilities:

• Write code that fulfills the functional, graphic and technical requirements of the project.
• Participate in the design of products and perform some testing activities.
• Provide the Lead Programmer with feedback regarding the time allotted to assigned tasks.
• Program tools and utilities to support work on projects.
• Develop and maintain plug-ins and stand-alone applications used in the creation and preprocessing of geometry, textures, animation data, scripts, etc.
• Work with proprietary existing software technology and build new technology in order to fulfill the project’s technical requirements.
• Adhere to the project’s coding standards.
• Research coding techniques and algorithms in order to keep current on technological developments and advancements in the game industry.
• Identify technical and developmental risks/obstacles and generate solutions to overcome identified risks.

Required Experience and Skills:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, related discipline, or relevant work experience.
• Expertise with the C/C++ programming language along with a strong familiarity with OO design principles.
• 2+ years of programming experience on commercial software projects.
• Commitment to code quality, documentation and sound testing procedures.
• Ability to learn and master new technologies and code.
• Ability to work independently and efficiently under deadlines.

• Experience developing for next-generation game consoles (PS3, Xbox 360, Wii).
• One or more shipped PC or console game titles, FPS or RPG titles .
• Experience working with the Unreal Engine.
• Experience working on multi-platform software projects.

So...when you were a kid, and you were building forts, did you prefer to use scotch tape or the family's World Book Encyclopedia volumes to hold the blankets and sheets in place? Would you be excited to build a fort that was supposed to be a space station? How about an Art-Deco Utopian metropolis at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean? We are recruiting Level Builders to help us build levels for our next, unannounced project. Our Level Architects will work with a Level Designer and a Level Modeler to brainstorm, concept, and create levels for a next-gen console game project.

As a Level Architect, you will be responsible for managing the artistic side of individual level construction as well as modeling and texturing architectural and decorative assets to assemble your level with. You will be paired with a Level Modeler who will be assigned to help you with modeling and texturing as the level construction process progresses. Finally, you will light and optimize your level. If you love building forts and you play well with others, we wanna talk to you. Oh yeah, we use Unreal and 3D Studio Max these days instead of bed sheets and Scotch tape.

Job Responsibilities:

• Function as part of a three-person team tasked with building large levels for a next-gen console title: Level Builder, Level Modeler, and Level Designer
• Collaborate with and task your paired Level Modeler in asset creation
• Sketch/Paint/Concept ideas for 3D game locations
• Work out the details and concept modular systems of architecture for levels
• Produce 3D architectural assets in 3D Studio Max
• Layout and light final levels in Unreal
• Optimize final levels for performance
• Work with Level Designer to make gameplay and 3D space function harmoniously
• Work with Art director, Lead Artist to ensure artistic unity with the entire project

Required Skills:

• Possess a wealth of experience modeling and lighting assets and spaces for games
• Able to collaborate with production staff from other departments on a peer level
• Able to collaborate with and task more junior members of the art department
• Can take direction well
• Able to respond elegantly to difficult creative changes, often late in the process
• Self-motivated towards solving creative problems
• Able to communicate with other artists visually using quick thumbnail sketches or paintings
• Understand game-related concepts related to 3D space and possess a keen interest in the medium of videogames

Extra Credit:

• Experience with the Unreal Engine
• Fluency with 3D Studio Max and Photoshop
• Background in architecture or lighting
• 3+ years game industry experience