Game Developer — Character & MetaHuman Systems
About the Project
We are building a large-scale UE5.8 zombie survival game with a living, procedurally generated world, large zombie populations, randomized survivors, vehicles, animals, weapons, occupations, and a deep character customization system.
We are looking for developers who can take ownership of major systems rather than simply completing isolated tasks.
Position1(see more below): Character / MetaHuman Developer
Primary responsibility: Own the game's MetaHuman character pipeline, including clothing, accessories, headwear, customization, and character variation.
You will be the go-to developer for everything involving MetaHuman clothing and wearable assets.
Responsibilities
- Build and maintain the MetaHuman clothing and accessory pipeline in Unreal Engine 5.8.
- Import, configure, and optimize clothing assets for MetaHumans.
- Create and maintain hats, helmets, caps, masks, glasses, backpacks, and other head/body accessories.
- Handle proper fitting, deformation, skinning, physics, and LODs.
- Develop systems for dynamically combining clothing and accessories without obvious clipping or broken meshes.
- Build a large library of interchangeable clothing and headwear.
- Support procedural/randomized survivor generation.
- Ensure clothing works across different MetaHuman body types, ages, genders, and character variations.
- Integrate clothing with the game's character-generation and spawning systems.
- Create systems for zombies and survivors to use randomized clothing combinations.
- Optimize character assets for large numbers of characters on screen simultaneously.
- Work closely with programmers and technical artists to establish reusable pipelines rather than one-off solutions.
- Maintain clean Unreal asset organization and naming conventions.
- Troubleshoot MetaHuman, skeletal mesh, animation, material, physics, and clothing problems.
- Eventually help establish a pipeline for automatically generating thousands of believable civilian characters from a large clothing/appearance database.
Required Skills
- Strong Unreal Engine 5 experience.
- Experience working with MetaHuman.
- Strong understanding of skeletal meshes, skinning, deformation, sockets, materials, LODs, and animation.
- Experience with wearable character assets.
- Comfortable working with Unreal Blueprints and/or C++.
- Ability to diagnose and solve technical character-art problems independently.
- Understanding of performance optimization for games.
Highly Desired
- MetaHuman clothing workflows.
- Chaos Cloth.
- Marvelous Designer, CLO, Blender, Maya, or similar.
- Technical-art experience.
- Procedural character generation.
- PCG experience.
- Experience creating modular character systems.
- Experience optimizing large numbers of NPCs.
- Experience with zombie/horror games or large-scale crowd systems.
Ownership
This is not a "make me a hat" position.
You will own the entire wearable-character pipeline and be responsible for figuring out how we can efficiently go from:
3D clothing asset → MetaHuman integration → fitting/deformation → LODs → physics → customization → procedural randomization → finished NPC
You should be comfortable saying, "This system is going to break when we have 10,000 NPCs; here's how we should build it instead."
Additional Game Developer PositionsGameplay Programmer
Own gameplay systems including:
- Player controllers
- Combat
- Weapons
- Inventory
- Skills
- D&D-inspired character mechanics
- Occupations/backgrounds
- Animal companions
- Interaction systems
- Quests and objectives
- Multiplayer systems
- Gameplay AI integration
Skills: UE5, C++, Blueprints, gameplay architecture, networking, optimization.
Position2: AI / NPC Programmer
Own the intelligence behind the game's survivors, enemies, animals, and world simulation.
- Zombie AI and horde behavior
- Survivor AI
- NPC decision-making
- Perception
- Navigation
- Combat behavior
- Squad behavior
- Animal AI
- Dynamic encounters
- AI-assisted dialogue systems
- Large-scale NPC optimization
Experience with Unreal AI, Behavior Trees, StateTree, Mass Entity, EQS, navigation, and large-scale crowds is highly desirable.
Technical Artist / Procedural Content Developer
Own the systems that allow the game to generate enormous amounts of content.
- Unreal PCG
- Procedural cities
- Buildings
- Roads
- Vegetation
- Interior generation
- Loot placement
- NPC spawning
- Clothing/character randomization
- World population
- Performance optimization
- Tools for designers and artists
Experience with UE5 PCG, World Partition, procedural generation, Houdini, Blender, or technical art is highly desirable.
Position3: Environment Artist
Create the physical world of the game.
- Buildings
- Streets
- Interiors
- Props
- Urban environments
- Rural environments
- Vegetation
- Destruction
- Environmental storytelling
Experience with Unreal Engine 5 and modular environment construction preferred.
Position4: Animation / Character Artist
Create and maintain:
- Character animations
- Combat animations
- Zombie animations
- Locomotion
- Reactions
- Death animations
- Animal animations
- Procedural animation systems
- Motion matching
- MetaHuman animation
Experience with Unreal's animation systems and MetaHumans strongly preferred.
What We're Looking For
We want problem solvers and owners, not people who need every task broken down for them.
You should be able to take a major system, understand the goal, research the best approach, build it, test it, optimize it, and maintain it.
This is an ambitious project using Unreal Engine 5.8, procedural generation, AI-assisted development, and modular content systems. Developers who enjoy building systems that can scale dramatically are especially welcome.
If you want to own a major piece of a game rather than simply be another programmer on a production line, we'd like to hear from you.
Pay: $42.73 - $51.46 per hour
People with a criminal record are encouraged to apply
Work Location: Remote
