Environment Artist

If you love building worlds players want to get lost in — and you've survived a few of them yourself — we'd love to hear from you.

Tasks

On a day to day basis, you will:

• Create high-poly and low-poly models for environmental objects — with a clear focus on architecture: modular building kits, structures, and props
• Overhaul and optimize our existing asset kits: consolidate materials, reduce poly counts, and bring everything to a consistent, performant standard
• Create assets for bespoke landmark locations — the kind of places players remember
• Design with modularity and reusability in mind, so our world artists can build more with less
• Rework existing vegetation and natural assets to a cleaner, more maintainable standard where needed
• Work from photo reference and concept art to hit a believable, grounded look
• Produce clean, efficient UVs and game-ready assets that respect the technical limitations of a large open world
• Work closely with World Art, Level Design, and Tech Art to ensure requirements are met
• Help troubleshoot and fix problems as they arise, from a visual, technical, and production perspective

Requirements

• Previous experience on professional game projects
• A portfolio with clear examples of your own asset production — not just set dressing or kit-bashed scenes. On team pieces, tell us exactly which parts you made yourself; we do check.
• Solid experience building modular asset kits, and a real understanding of how worlds are constructed from them
• Strong modeling skills and experience in a major 3D package (Blender, Maya, 3ds Max)
• Sculpting experience with software like ZBrush
• Good understanding of the PBR material pipeline
• Solid grasp of baking and texturing using the Substance Suite and Photoshop
• Basic knowledge of shader creation
• Ability to resolve issues from a visual, technical, and production perspective
• Strong communication skills — you can articulate ideas and questions across departments, and give and receive constructive feedback
• We’d appreciate a link to your Steam profile, so we can get a feel for where your interests lie and where they overlap with ours
• Fluent spoken and written English

Bonus Skills

• Proficiency with Unreal Engine 5
• Knowledge of foliage creation
• Experience with procedural workflows (e.g. Houdini)
• Experience working on open world games
• Experience working in an indie or small team environment

Working Model

We offer

• Fully remote
• Freelance, with a full time option for candidates based in Germany
• Flexible working hours with a strong focus on ownership and trust
• Direct collaboration within a small, focused team

Benefits

• Work on Ardem, a highly anticipated survival game — and help set a new benchmark for the genre you love
• Small team with high impact, results-driven mindset and fast decision-making
• High ownership and creative freedom — shape the world, don't just fill tickets
• Flexible working hours (results > green dots)

How We Hire

• First interview — We talk about Techtive, Ardem, and the role, and get a high-level picture of your skills and how you work.
• Art test — If the first conversation goes well, you'll receive a small art test: a basic brief with a few guidelines and some inspirational screenshots from Ardem. Everything you build should work as part of a larger environment — we're not looking for isolated beauty shots that would fall apart in an actual game world. There's no fixed deadline, but we'll ask you to track roughly where your time went.
• Second interview — We go through your art test together: your decisions, your process, and where you spent your time.
• Culture fit — The final conversation is less about craft and more about people: how you like to work, what you expect from a team, and whether we actually fit each other. We're a small, fully remote crew — who you are matters as much as what you build. The practical side (contract, conditions, start date) gets sorted here too.

We know an art test is a real time investment, and not everyone can afford that easily — we don't take it for granted. It's the fairest way we've found to judge actual craft over a polished portfolio, and it's the basis for a much better conversation in round two.

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Posted Oct 31, 2026

Source: Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis), table; dl-de/by-2-0; StarIn's calculation