About the role

Location: North America Remote / Hybrid in San Francisco preferred Type: Contract-to-hire, 4-month contract period Start Date: Immediate Compensation: $50 – $100 USD/hour depending on experience, availability, location, and scope. This is a contract-to-hire role, with potential to convert to full-time.

About Us

Vinci Games is building the next generation of social virtual reality experiences. Our newest title, Ruffnauts, is a Pokémon-inspired social multiplayer VR game for kids and teens where players ride collectible pets, explore alien worlds, collect rewards, hatch and upgrade pets, and play with friends. Ruffnauts launched in Alpha last year and has grown to 61K+ reviews, becoming one of the highest-rated social VR games in its category. It was originally built by a team of 4. Our first title, Blacktop Hoops, reached over 1M installs and maintains a 4.9-star rating across 23,000+ reviews. We’re backed by Y Combinator, Makers Fund, and Kevin Lin, Co-Founder of Twitch. Our indie team brings experience from CD Projekt RED, Oculus, Unity, Google, and Downpour Interactive. We are a small, fast-moving, remote team focused on building genre-defining social VR games through rapid iteration and real player feedback.

The Role

We’re looking for a hands-on Lead 3D Artist / Art Lead to raise the visual quality bar for Ruffnauts. This is not a pure art director role. You will personally create, polish, review, optimize, and ship stylized 3D assets for a fast-moving social VR game built for kids and teens. Your first mission will be helping us level up Ruffnauts’ worlds, pets, cosmetics, rewards, hub spaces, and game-ready assets as we prepare for a broader launch. You’ll be the day-to-day art owner for the game: someone with strong taste, fast execution, and the judgment to keep internal and external contributors visually aligned. The ideal candidate is a stylized 3D generalist with impeccable taste, strong execution speed, and the ability to work rapidly across multiple disciplines. You can make practical tradeoffs, ship appealing assets under real VR performance constraints, and take an idea from sketch to in-game implementation within the same day. Contract-to-Hire Path: This is a contract-to-hire role with an initial 4-month contract period. We’ll have a 30-day ramp check-in and a conversion discussion around the 90-day mark. Depending on mutual fit, performance, business needs, and agreement on final terms we may convert to full-time or extend or conclude engagement.

What You’ll Do

• Create,

polish, and optimize stylized 3D assets for Ruffnauts including stylized creatures, environments, cosmetics, and more

• Own day-to-day visual consistency and help raise the overall art quality bar across 2D,

3D animations VFX and UI

• Improve worlds biomes hub spaces props cosmetics pets creatures rewards shop items
• Review outsourced contractor-created assets giving clear actionable feedback
• Create simple briefs references visual guidelines for internal external contributors
• Bring assets into Unity check scale readability performance implementation quality
• Collaborate with designers engineers animators technical artists to ensure assets shippable on Meta Quest
• Make fast pragmatic art decisions in small team with shifting priorities real player feedback

Requirements

• Experience shipping optimized 3D content in premium or F2P VR title on Meta Quest PSVR2 or other VR platforms
• Strong portfolio of stylized game-ready 3D art including character art environment art on shipped indie AA AAA titles
• Strong experience with Blender or similar tools
• Strong experience with Unity
• Strong modeling texturing material optimization skills
• Strong taste around stylized appeal silhouette color readability charm marketability
• Experience creating environments props cosmetics characters creatures or other real-time 3D assets
• Understanding of VR Meta Quest mobile or constrained-platform performance requirements
• Ability to review art give clear feedback maintain consistency across multiple contributors
• Comfortable working hands-on in small fast-moving team
• Strong communication skills ability to turn rough direction into shippable assets

Bonus Points

• Experience with sketching concept art production
• Experience creating basic stylized animations
• Experience shipping content for VR Meta Quest mobile
• Familiarity with Gorilla Tag-style VR games social VR games arm-swinging locomotion games
• Experience with creature-collection games pet games social games expressive character-driven worlds
• Creature modeling rigging animation animation cleanup experience
• Experience with stylized VFX spatial UI diegetic UI in-world interaction visuals
• Experience with Substance Painter ZBrush Houdini procedural world-building tools
• Experience building light art pipelines small teams indie studios live games
• Passion for VR social games movement games creature collection stylized worlds player expression

Why Us

At Vinci Games you’ll have opportunity to help define visual identity of breakout social VR game at rare stage: early enough your taste execution can shape product but proven enough real players already showing up. As Lead 3D Artist / Art Lead you won’t just make assets isolation but help raise overall quality bar for Ruffnauts’ worlds pets cosmetics rewards hub spaces player-facing content influencing how game perceived shared remembered by kids teens. We move quickly test ideas headset learn from real player behavior make practical creative decisions under real VR constraints. Hands-on role for someone wanting ownership creative impact chance build distinctive stylized world charm readability mass-market appeal.