Lionhead seem to be hiring a few more folk now, especially animators & tools people. That’s only to be expected - like Molyneux said, in the first stage of any game you need very few people, but that number quickly and drastically increases as soon as you have the design mostly figured out.

From their Jobs page, what they’re looking for right now is:

  • Senior (but not Lead) Designer: the Lead’s (read: Molyneux’s) right hand, to handle design and such. It would be rather late in the game for this to be for Fable 2, and since one of the job roles will be to contribute to the game design and design document it’s probably for the Secret Game. Most interestingly, an ideal candidate will have online melee experience. Since several months ago they were looking for senior engineers with internet experience, it seems likely that the Secret Game will have at least an online component. On the other hand, it’s been suggested that Fable 2 arena one-on-one fighting will be possible, so the Senior Designer may simply be taking on that part of the game.
  • Tool Programmer, Core Tech: making software and code to make everyone else’s work fit together, basically, and working on the bugs. Since it’s for the Core Technology Group in LHS, they’d probably work on both games.
  • Character TD Prototype Team: no idea what TD means, but I’m guessing Technical Designer or somesuch. It’s for someone to rig characters and animals, and possibly make tools to rig them.
    Edit: TD means technical director, it’s sort of a managerial role leading a team of technicians/artists, you need to know a bit about everything rather than be a purist modeller/animator/texture artist /render monkey* so you can follow what your guys are doing, but also good enough to do a bit yourself. It’s a pretty well paid gig and would require some experience.*technical term.
    ~ Tokie [thanks muchly!]
  • Mocap TD: motion capture work, so trying to make characters and animals move as realistically as possible. This position is mainly about the workflow, so for example setting up a pipeline (each person doing one task, passing on to the next until the job is done) to animate models.
  • Concept Storyboard Artist: this one’s really interesting, as it must be for the Secret Game: “A talented visualiser to work with the Art director and Senior Designer on an exciting and very challenging new project. The project is still at concept/prototype stage so there is plenty of opportunity to be involved at the formative stages as well as servicing the art and game design teams during pre-production and production.“ This job involves just about anything art/concept related, so publicity, character design, scenarios and environments. It doesn’t tell us much about the game, of course, other than that they still have some major roles to fill.
  • Junior XSI Animator Prototype Team: another animation job.
  • Fable 2 Art Team Technical Artist / TD: this is really interesting - since this one is labeled Fable 2, does that mean that all unlabeled ones are for the Secret Game? This is a job for an animator, modeler or texturer, though.
  • Fable 2 Animation Team Technical Animator: again, another animator for Fable 2. Seems like a shortage or something, sheesh, what do they want with all these animators?