Game Art Lead

Working Conditions

• Location: Canada only
• Commitment: 10 hours/week minimum
• Contract: Banked hours during pre-funding. All hours are tracked and paid once funding is secured. We are actively prospecting.
• Stage: Final phase of pre-production. This role is critical to closing pre-production and preparing for full production.
• Team: Small, remote, indie / AA studio where people wear multiple hats.

About Khrönmière

Khrönmière Entertainment builds narrative-driven, systemically rich games with a strong focus on atmosphere, authorship, and player respect. We combine deliberate creative direction with practical production thinking, aiming to ship meaningful games without crunch or creative compromise.

About Project Black

Project Black is an atmospheric narrative puzzle-adventure game built around a unique perception-driven gameplay system. The experience focuses on curiosity, exploration, spatial reasoning, and systemic interaction, blending environmental storytelling with tense navigation and layered puzzle design.

Designed with a strong “less is more” philosophy, Project Black combines stylized low-poly visuals, intentional lighting, and immersive spatial audio to create a highly readable yet deeply atmospheric experience. The game emphasizes player interpretation and discovery over direct exposition, encouraging exploration through observation, experimentation, and understanding of the world’s interconnected systems.

Project Black is currently in active pre-production as part of Khrönmière Entertainment’s internal development initiative.

The Role

We are looking for an Art Lead to help guide, strengthen, and execute the visual direction of Project Black.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will not only help align and support the art team but also actively contribute to creating visual content for the project. The role works closely with the Creative Director, Art Director-level vision holders, and multidisciplinary teams to ensure that the game’s visual identity is clear, consistent, production-friendly, and deeply connected to gameplay and atmosphere.

As Art Lead, you will help oversee and coordinate the artistic work across concept art, 3D art production, animation, and technical art. Your mission is to help translate the project’s creative vision into a practical art pipeline, support the artists around you, and contribute directly to building the dream art team this project needs.

What You’ll Focus On

• Art Leadership: Guide the visual execution of the project across concept art, 3D art, animation, and technical art, ensuring that all disciplines move in the same creative and production direction.
• Hands-On Art Contribution: Produce visual content directly when needed, including concepts, paint-overs, production callouts, blockouts, visual targets, asset feedback, documentation, and other practical art deliverables.
• Visual Consistency: Maintain alignment with the established art direction, ensuring that environments, characters, props, lighting, animation, and technical art all support the same tone, atmosphere, and visual language.
• Production Support: Help define clear asset expectations, review work, provide actionable feedback, and ensure concepts and visual targets can be translated into production-ready game content.
• Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration: Work closely with design, narrative, engineering, audio, and production to ensure the art supports gameplay readability, storytelling, performance, and player experience.
• Pipeline and Process: Help identify art pipeline needs, improve workflows, support documentation, and collaborate with technical art and engineering to keep the game visually strong and technically achievable.
• Team Building: Support the studio in building a strong, collaborative, and reliable art team by helping identify needs, mentor contributors, evaluate work, and create a healthy creative environment.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong portfolio demonstrating excellent art fundamentals, including composition, lighting, shape language, color, mood, readability, and visual storytelling.
• Experience leading or guiding artists in a game development environment, even if the team was small or informal.
• Ability to work within an established visual direction while helping refine, protect, and elevate it.
• Strong understanding of game art production, including how concept art, 3D assets, animation, and technical art connect inside a real-time pipeline.
• Ability to give clear, respectful, and actionable feedback to artists across multiple disciplines.
• Comfort working hands-on while also helping others move forward.
• Good production judgment, including the ability to balance ambition, scope, quality, readability, and technical constraints.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills within small, iterative development environments.
• A can-do mindset and genuine desire to help build something ambitious, even when wearing more than one hat.

We do not expect you to know everything. We expect strong fundamentals, good judgment, mature leadership, and the motivation to close gaps where needed.

Nice to Have

• Experience with stylized low-poly or deliberately minimalist visual styles.
• Experience with atmospheric, narrative-driven, puzzle, adventure, horror, or exploration-focused games.
• Understanding of Unreal Engine art workflows, including lighting, materials, optimization, asset integration, and technical art collaboration.
• Experience supporting small teams through pre-production into production.
• Experience creating art bibles, visual targets, style guides, asset briefs, and production documentation.

Why This Matters

This is not an isolated art role. The work done here directly impacts the identity, readability, atmosphere, and production success of Project Black.

The Art Lead will help ensure that the game’s visual language remains focused, expressive, and achievable. This role is especially important because Project Black depends on restraint, clarity, mood, and player interpretation. The art must do more than look good. It must guide the player, support the systems, reinforce the world, and make the experience memorable.

If you enjoy shaping strong visual identities, supporting artists, solving production problems, and contributing hands-on to a collaborative game project, this role offers meaningful responsibility and creative influence.

Inclusion

Khrönmière Entertainment is an equal opportunity team. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and identities.