Makeshift Software is hiring: Animation Director in Columbus

Makeshift Software Inc.

| Remote (3–6 months) → Hybrid On-Site

Full-Time
About Hexborn

Hexborn is our upcoming dark fantasy action RPG — a brutal blend of hack-and-slash combat, deep dungeon crawling, guild progression, and player-driven rivalry set in a world consumed by an ever-expanding corruption known as the Graveglass Blight.

Players rise from an unknown mage into the leader of a legendary guild, mastering arcane combat, recruiting allies, forging relics, and descending into cursed ruins and large-scale raids to uncover the truth behind their rare ability to fly.

The demo is live now on Steam.

We're building toward a cinematic bar that matches the quality references below — both in gameplay animation and in prerendered cutscenes — and we need someone who can lead that effort end to end, from mocap capture through final render.
The Role

We're looking for an experienced Animation Director to lead animation for

Hexborn

— setting the creative and technical bar across gameplay animation, cinematics, and prerendered film sequences, and building the team and pipeline needed to hit it consistently.

You'll own the full animation pipeline from mocap cleanup through rigging through final cinematic output, while directing a team and keeping animation tightly aligned with the rest of art and design.

This is a leadership role with real hands-on depth expected. You'll be setting direction and reviewing work, but also expected to get into rigs, mocap data, and render setups yourself when the bar demands it.

What You'll Do

Set and enforce the animation quality bar across gameplay, cinematics, and

prerendered cutscenes/film

Direct and clean up

motion capture data

to production-ready quality

Build and maintain

extensible control rigs

for both

biped and creature

character types

Own prerendered cinematic pipelines using

Blender, VRay, and Houdini

Provide

art direction

for the animation team, and streamline collaboration between animation, character art, and cinematics

Establish workflows and standards that let the animation team scale without sacrificing consistency

Work within our existing animation tooling: Animation Sets in use and our broader workflow tools

Partner with engineering to ensure animation systems (blending, IK, procedural layers) support director-level intent
Quality Bar References

To give a sense of the cinematic and animation quality we're aiming for:

Reference 1
Reference 2
Perks & Tools

OptiTrack Prime 41

motion capture system

Faceware Mark IV

mocap helmets for facial performance capture

Industry-grade workstation, built to spec: see our standard build

Remote for the first 3–6 months, transitioning to hybrid on-site thereafter
Work Arrangement

We'll start fully remote for a 3–6 month grace period while you ramp up and get embedded with the team, then transition to a hybrid on-site schedule in Columbus, OH.
Columbus is also a genuinely affordable place to build a life relative to the coastal cities most gamedev careers run through. Cost of living runs roughly:

50%

below Seattle and Santa Cruz — driven mostly by housing, where Columbus's median home price (around

$263K ) compares to

$808K

in Seattle and

$1.24M

in Santa Cruz — and it stays competitive even against Montreal, historically one of the more

cost-conscious

major gamedev hubs in North America.
Makeshift Software Inc

is the developer and publisher of

Hexborn .