About Us
Hidden Acorn is a new game studio based in the San Francisco Bay Area building our first title: a competitive, PvP real-time strategy game launching across all major platforms. We're a small, ambitious team and we are looking for talented, passionate people who'll build it with us from the ground up.
About the Role
Hidden Acorn is looking for a talented Character Artist to help us build the roster at the heart of our RTS. Characters are the soul of this genre — players pick their favorites, study their animations, argue about their designs — and we want to make units worth that kind of attention. You'll be working closely with our Creative Director to bring heroes, units, and creatures from concept to game-ready asset in Unreal Engine 5, helping us build a visual language that's consistent, readable, and genuinely exciting to look at.
What You'll Do
- Work with the Creative Director to create concept art and sculpt highly detailed heroes, units, and creatures that form the visual backbone of our roster
- Sculpt high-poly characters in ZBrush: heroes, units, and creatures
- Retopologize to clean game-res meshes with sensible polycount and edge flow for deformation
- Texture in a PBR workflow: albedo, roughness/metallic, normals, channel-packed masks
- Set up and maintain assets in Unreal Engine 5, including imports, LODs, and material instances, so characters are ready to drop into the game
- Collaborate with the Creative Director on faction design, costume language, and visual hierarchy
- Maintain consistency across a growing roster so the game's art feels cohesive as the character library expands
- Help document new and existing asset pipeline conventions to streamline processes for artists across the team
What We're Looking For
- 3–5 years of character art experience with at least one shipped or near-shipped project
- Highly skilled at sculpting, retopology, UV layout, and PBR texturing for real-time characters
- Ability to execute a visual style consistently across a roster — hand-painted, photorealistic, or stylized
- Working knowledge of Unreal Engine 5 at a pipeline level: importing, material setup, LOD configuration
- Strong portfolio showing characters that read clearly at a distance; Examples in RTS, MOBA, or strategy game work are preferred
Nice to Have
- Rigging and/or animation experience
- Experience designing within a faction or faction system (distinct visual languages per team/race/side)
- Concept art skills at a thumbnail/ideation level
- Familiarity with VAT or ISM workflows for crowd rendering
What We Offer
- Your work will be among the most visible things in the game. Players will spend more time looking at your characters than almost anything else
- Small, passionate team with a culture of adding new ideas. Your voice matters regardless of what role you're in
- Remote-friendly
- Competitive compensation based on experience
Please email your resume and portfolio to steven@hidden-acorn.com