Nexters is seeking a highly skilled, structurally minded, and visually creative 2D Animator to join our elite internal development group supporting our global flagship title, Hero Wars: Dominion Era. In this critical production role, you will take full ownership of the end-to-end 2D animation production cycle. Your daily responsibilities will bridge the gap between pure artistic movement and technical execution, running from initial asset preparation and skeletal rigging within Esoteric Spine to complex character, creature, prop, and real-time visual effects (VFX) implementation directly inside the Unity game engine. This position is tailored for an experienced animation specialist who not only possesses a comprehensive grasp of classical motion physics but also understands the intricacies of performance optimization for mobile and web-based game engines. Beyond individual asset authoring, you will serve as a stabilizing technical pillar for the animation team—mentoring junior and mid-level artists, refining pipeline documentation, and architecting efficient, scalable asset structures that preserve our game’s visual fidelity across thousands of legacy devices worldwide. Job Overview : 2D Animator Attribute Details Job Title 2D Animator Company Nexters (NASDAQ: GDEV) Project Assignment Hero Wars: Dominion Era Work Arrangement Fully Remote / Hybrid / Onsite (Cyprus, Armenia, Kazakhstan) Core Software Stack Esoteric Spine, Unity, Adobe Photoshop Required Experience 2–3+ Years of Shipped Mobile/Web Game Experience Key Specializations Skeletal Rigging, Mesh Deformation, Texture Optimization, In-Engine VFX Benefits Focus Comprehensive International Relocation & Private Family Healthcare About Nexters & GDEV Nexters is an international, boundary-pushing game development enterprise dedicated to bringing the depth, engagement, and strategic joy of core gaming experiences to a massive, casual global audience. Founded on the principles of creative bravery and radical collaboration, Nexters broke onto the world stage in 2021 by going public and listing on the NASDAQ (ticker: GDEV). Today, Nexters operates as a proud foundational pillar of the GDEV holding company—an elite gaming collective that also encompasses Cubic Games, Royal Ark, and Game Gears studios. Our global workforce spans dozens of countries, operating out of state-of-the-art hubs in Cyprus, Armenia, and Kazakhstan, as well as a highly sophisticated, asynchronous remote network. We purposefully build cultures that strip away administrative overhead and emphasize psychological safety, direct ownership, and continuous creative experimentation. By joining the Hero Wars team, you are entering a high-velocity ecosystem that values your unique artistic voice and supports your holistic personal and technical evolution. Position Scope & The Animation Pipeline As a 2D Animator for Hero Wars: Dominion Era, you will be stepping into an established, incredibly high-traffic environment where your work will be seen daily by millions of active players. This role demands an animator who looks at an asset not just as a static illustration, but as a dynamic system of motion waiting to be brought to life. You will manage the structural translation of layered PSD characters into fully kinetic, highly expressive digital puppets. This requires an exceptional eye for anatomy, weight, and silhouette integrity, ensuring that complex mesh deformations and skinning structures hold up perfectly under extreme combat pacing. You will work side-by-side with concept artists, UI/UX designers, and client engineers to ensure that character animations look fluid and feel instantly responsive to player inputs, while maintaining minimal memory footprints. As a 2D Animator for Hero Wars: Dominion Era, you will be stepping into an established, incredibly high-traffic environment where your work will be seen daily by millions of active players. This role demands an animator who looks at an asset not just as a static illustration, but as a dynamic system of motion waiting to be brought to life. You will manage the structural translation of layered PSD characters into fully kinetic, highly expressive digital puppets. This requires an exceptional eye for anatomy, weight, and silhouette integrity, ensuring that complex mesh deformations and skinning structures hold up perfectly under extreme combat pacing. You will work side-by-side with concept artists, UI/UX designers, and client engineers to ensure that character animations look fluid and feel instantly responsive to player inputs, while maintaining minimal memory footprints. Key Responsibilities as 2D Animator 1. End-to-End Pipeline Execution in Esoteric Spine Asset Ingestion & Preparation: Seamlessly export, slice, and layer raw character and prop assets out of Adobe Photoshop, organizing textures and layers for optimal rigging efficiency. Skeletal Rigging & Skinning: Construct complex, highly intuitive skeletal structures, utilizing advanced weighting, vertex mesh deformation, and weighted skinning to enable realistic cloth folds, muscle flexing, and organic weapon arcs. Character & Prop Animation: Author highly expressive idle loops, high-impact combat sequences, signature special moves, and physics-driven prop animations that align with character lore. Project Optimization: Oversee texture atlas packaging, coordinate keyframe reductions, and eliminate redundant bone paths to maximize runtime performance. 2. In-Engine Implementation & VFX Authoring Unity System Integration: Directly implement Spine runtimes and animations into active Unity branches, verifying state machine continuity and layout alignment. Visual Effects Creation: Concept and execute striking dynamic visual effects (magical particle bursts, impact sparks, atmospheric glows) utilizing a combination of Spine mesh animations and Unity’s native particle and VFX graphs. Technical Troubleshooting: Detect and resolve asset-rendering bugs, depth-sorting anomalies, and animation caching hitches within the game engine environment. 3. Leadership, Mentorship & Documentation Team Upskilling: Actively mentor, guide, and critique junior and mid-level 2D animators, helping them elevate their technical rigging competencies and timing accuracy. Pipeline Documentation: Author clear, accessible style bibles, rigging benchmarks, and optimization checklists to preserve visual uniformity across all external and internal development pipelines. About You (Selection Criteria) We are hunting for a proactive, technically fluent animator who loves resolving unconventional architectural challenges and thrives in a team-centric environment. Core Technical Profile Spine Mastery: Deep, demonstrable expertise utilizing Esoteric Spine. You must possess complete command over weight maps, mesh deformation, complex constraints, skinning workflows, and texture atlas packaging. Animation Fundamentals: An unyielding, instinctual grasp of the 12 Principles of Animation (squash and stretch, anticipation, staging, follow-through, overlapping action, slow in and slow out, etc.), translating these classical principles flawlessly into digital space. Unity Literacy: Confident, professional experience working within Unity, handling basic … Read more
