3D Character Animator

3D Character Animator - Indie Platform Fighter

I'm looking to hire an experienced 3D Character Animator to help bring the fighters in an upcoming indie platform fighter to life.

The game is a fast-paced, combat-focused platform fighter featuring gods, deities, and religious figures from different traditions battling one another. I'm looking for someone who can create dynamic, highly readable, hard-hitting combat animation, with attacks that feel powerful, responsive, expressive, and satisfying in gameplay.

What I'm Looking For

Required

• Strong professional portfolio demonstrating 3D character animation
• Ideally 5–10+ years of 3D animation experience
• Experience working on indie games or other real-time game projects
• Excellent understanding of:
• Combat animation
• Body mechanics
• Weight and momentum
• Timing, anticipation, follow-through, and impact
• Exaggerated poses and readable silhouettes
• Ability to create everything from quick jabs and movement animations to large, epic special attacks and finishing moves
• Understanding of the technical constraints of animation for real-time gameplay
• Comfortable iterating based on how animations actually feel in-game

Strongly Preferred

• Cascadeur
• Blender
• Unity
• Experience exporting animation assets and implementing/testing them inside Unity

Bonus Skills

I'd especially love to find someone capable of handling more of the full 3D character pipeline, including:

• Retopology (for minor clean-up work)
• UV unwrapping
• Texturing
• Rigging (especially for animals, or characters with multiple arms or wings)
• Weight painting
• Character and animal animation
• Preparing/exporting characters and animations for Unity
• Troubleshooting rigs, meshes, animation clips, and import settings

These additional skills are a major plus, but animation is the priority. If you're an exceptional combat animator who specializes specifically in animation, I still want to hear from you.

The Project

This is an indie platform fighter built around a roster of mythological and religious characters, with an intentionally comedic, irreverent, and satirical tone.

Important: The game contains deliberately blasphemous and sacrilegious humor and jokes about gods, religions, religious beliefs, and religious figures. Applicants need to be genuinely comfortable working on that kind of material.

Who Would Be a Great Fit

I'm looking for someone who:

• Loves making combat animation feel ridiculously satisfying
• Understands that gameplay readability matters as much as beautiful animation
• Can exaggerate movement without making it feel weightless
• Is comfortable working collaboratively and iterating quickly
• Has experience with small or independent game-development teams
• Can take a relatively simple stylized character and give them a huge amount of personality through movement
• If you've worked on a fighting game, platform fighter, action game, or anything involving exaggerated character combat, I'd especially like to see it.