Job Description
Craft: Art Director will lead the visual direction and creative quality on a newly developed game experience. You’ll define the artistic vision, set the visual tone, and ensure high-quality execution across all art disciplines from concept to live operations.
Unlike traditional leadership-only roles, this position blends strategic direction with hands-on craft. You’ll not only inspire teams through vision but also contribute directly to production through prototyping, VFX development, and Unity-based implementation.
This is a developmental project and blends the need to develop the product and the team itself, ensuring that the team develops into a fully realized organization capable of scaling and supporting a successful market-leading live operations free-to-play mobile title.
You will partner closely with Product, Design, Tech, and Marketing to deliver visuals that are innovative, performant, and emotionally resonant, while staying true to the King brand.
Your Responsibilities
* Set and champion the overall visual vision, ensuring clarity and cohesion across all game elements.
* Work hands-on in Unity and King proprietary tools to prototype, refine, and implement visual solutions ensuring creative ideas are validated early and iterated quickly.
* Define and drive Visual and VFX direction, establishing quality benchmarks and ensuring effects enhance gameplay readability, feedback, and delight.
* Collaborate with tech art to push the limits of Unity’s and King’s toolset, optimizing for both performance and visual fidelity.
* Establish efficient iteration loops, ensuring art direction evolves rapidly based on player data, team feedback, and market trends.
* Mentor and develop artists across disciplines, providing feedback on both creative and technical execution.
* Partner with the Design and Product leads to ensure the visual direction enhances the game’s emotional, narrative, and commercial goals.
* Balance creative ambition with production realities ensuring deliverables are high-quality, on-time, and optimized for live service workflows.
* Reports to the Creative/Product project lead.
Skills to Create Thrills
* Proven experience as an Art Director or Senior Artist in mobile game development.
* Expert proficiency in Unity, including lighting, materials, shaders, and visual effects.
* Strong understanding of real-time VFX, particle systems, and animation integration.
* Demonstrated ability to rapidly prototype and iterate within an engine environment.
* A solid portfolio showing a range of hands-on work from style exploration to polished implementation.
* Clear understanding of player-centered art direction balancing clarity, personality, and delight.
* Excellent communication and leadership skills, with experience guiding multi-disciplinary teams.
* A passion for craft, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
Bonus Points
* Experience shipping live games with continuous content pipelines.
* Familiarity with performance profiling and optimization in Unity.
* Experience collaborating with motion design, animation, or cinematics teams.
* Strong grasp of visual storytelling and how art supports emotional pacing in gameplay.
About King
With a mission of Making the World Playful, King is a leading interactive entertainment company with more than 20 years of history of delivering some of the world’s most iconic games in the mobile gaming industry, including the world-famous Candy Crush franchise, as well as other mobile game hits such as Farm Heroes Saga. King games are played by more than 200 million monthly active users. King, part of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), has teams in Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Malta. More information can be found at King.com or by following us on LinkedIn, @lifeatking on Instagram, or @king_games on X.
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