Animator; Gameplay & Motion Matching

We're looking for an Animator to join our team as we move into full production on our debut game Ardem, an open world survival game developed in Unreal Engine 5.

In this role, your focus is making Ardem's characters move like real people and its zombies move like something that used to be. We're going for grounded, natural, realistic animation, built on Epic's Game Animation Sample Project (GASP) and motion matching. You won't be animating everything from scratch: a big part of the job is taking existing animation packs from Fab and other stores, cleaning them up, reworking them and fitting them into our motion matching setup so that the result looks like it was made for Ardem — not bought for it.

You'll work closely with our Tech Animator, Gameplay Programming and Tech Art, and you'll have real influence on how our animation pipeline evolves.

One thing we care about a lot: we want people who actually play survival games. If you've spent hundreds of hours in the genre, you know the difference between a character that feels heavy and grounded.
That's also why we'd love it if you share your Steam profile with your application — not as a gate, we're just genuinely curious where your gaming interests lie and how much they overlap with what we're building.

Techtive Games is an ambitious indie studio based in Germany with a close knit team that focuses on building deep, interconnected gameplay systems and immersive, authentic worlds. We value creativity, ownership, and personal growth. Rather than working through rigid ticket pipelines, our team members are encouraged to actively shape systems, improve workflows, and grow together not only on Ardem, but on future projects as well.

If you love making characters feel alive — and the dead feel uncomfortably close to alive — we'd love to hear from you.

On a day to day basis, you will:

• Build and expand player locomotion and traversal on top of GASP: motion matching, Pose Search databases, Choosers and the Mover-based character setup

• Rework, clean up and adapt store animation packs (Fab and others): fixing foot sliding, pops and contact issues, adjusting timing and weight, and making sets from different sources feel like one consistent character

• Retarget and prepare animation data for our skeletons and characters, including curves, root motion and the metadata motion matching needs

• Create and polish realistic gameplay animations for survival: interactions, gathering and crafting, melee and ranged combat, hit reactions, injuries and deaths

• Build the zombie animation set: locomotion, attacks, hit reactions, staggers, falls and get-ups — realistic and believable, not cartoonish

• Work with physics-based animation: ragdolls, physical hit reactions and motion-matched get-ups that blend back into animation

• Use Control Rig and in-engine tools for fixes, layering and procedural adjustments (look-at, foot placement, pose warping)

• Keep animation performant in a large open world with many characters on screen — LODs, animation budgeting and sensible database sizes

• Work closely with our Tech Animator, Gameplay Programming and Tech Art to make sure animations hold up in-game, not just in the viewport

• Help troubleshoot and fix problems as they arise, from a visual, technical, and production perspective

• Previous experience on professional game projects

• Hands-on experience with motion matching in Unreal Engine — ideally with GASP — including building and debugging Pose Search databases

• A proven track record of reworking and integrating third-party animation (store packs, mocap libraries) to a consistent quality bar

• A strong eye for realistic human motion: weight, balance, momentum and timing

• Solid experience with motion capture cleanup and editing

• Strong skills in…