Character Artist​/Animator

We're on the hunt for contractors to join the Coop team in one of two ways: a Character Artist and a Character Animator (two people), or one person who can cover both roles.

You'll be joining a small team developing a top-down dungeon combat game in Unreal Engine 5. You'll work closely with a small group of technical designers to replace placeholder meshes and animations. The art style is simple, colourful and cartoony, with some anime-inspired elements. Texturing is mostly done with gradient-based textures.

Character Artist:

If you're applying as a Character Artist (or covering both roles), you'll be designing and creating some remaining humanoid characters, enemies and armour pieces. You'll also be polishing and improving some existing character models.

Character Animator:

If you're applying as a Character Animator (or covering both roles), you'll be creating animations for existing skeletal meshes in the project, which may involve some rigging. Working in an external application (such as Blender or Maya) is fine. You'll be building skeletons, skinning, rigging and animating new humanoid characters and enemies, whether created by you or by a separate Character Artist, and skinning new armour pieces to existing skeletons.

For both roles:

You're confident working in Unreal Engine 5, including importing and setting up assets.

Ideally you've worked on a combat-focused game or prototype, so you know what character work in this context needs to do.

If you're applying as a Character Artist:

Please share a portfolio showing stylised character modelling and texturing.

Ideally that portfolio would include stylised or anime-inspired work in line with our artistic direction. Gradient-based texturing is a bonus.

If you're applying as a Character Animator:

Please share a reel showing rigging and game-ready character animation.

Ideally you've used Unreal's built-in animation and rigging tools, such as Control Rig and IK Retargeter – but it's more important to us that you're happy to get stuck in with them.

We'd like to see that you've taken a character from concept through to animating it in-engine. A single project that shows the whole journey is ideal.

Please tell us which role (or roles) you're applying for. We'd love to know what's unique about your style - your inspirations, and how you express you in your work!

We encourage people from all walks of life to apply. Even if you don't quite hit each and every point above, if you feel you'd be a good fit for this role we'd still like to hear from you.

Exact timings for this work will take shape as we go, and we'll agree them together with whoever joins us: so rather than set a rate that might not hold, we'd like you to tell us yours. Here's our current estimate of the work:

Character Animator
: approx 50-62 days of work

Character Artist
: approx 13 days of work

Character Artist/Animator
: approx 75 days of work

If you're covering both roles, we're looking for someone who can ideally work full-time during the contract period, but the right person is more important. We encourage you to still apply even if full-time isn't possible for you at the moment: we can discuss exact arrangements as we go.

Please include your day rate in your application, and tell us whether it includes VAT. If you're covering both roles, a single rate for the whole contract is fine. We'd rather talk about money honestly from the start, so if your rate is outside what we can offer, we'll tell you quickly rather than leave you waiting.

You'll work with us as a self-employed contractor and invoice monthly, with payment within 30 days.

Cooperative Innovations (or "Coop", as we call ourselves) is a game technology studio founded in 2016. We build games, tools and Unreal Engine systems for teams creating interactive experiences. We work closely with studios, creators and partners at every stage of their development process.

We're a small, multi-disciplinary team of T-shaped creative people, covering Programming, Production, Technical Design, QA and Operations. Small enough that you'll get to know everyone well, big enough that there's real depth of experience to draw on.

We know first-hand where development friction exists, because we've lived it through our own game development projects. That experience has shaped the tools we've built to solve our problems and now powers the products and services we share with others, including KERNL, our toolkit for development teams and…