I counted on LinkedIn right before this call 11 gaming Studios and I think the other two places you worked were the

cartoonists my career actually got started pretty soon like when I was just 17 and now I’m going to touch 14 and

you’ve worked at some very different Studios like roio Finnish culture King but the Spanish version the values were

very different they surprised me by a lot he D lessons you’ve learned about being a great leader that you wish you

learned sooner decision making I think and that’s is a difficult thing to actually teach anyone I think that’s

important to reiterate you were an unofficial art lead before you got the promotion so always I think this is

always the case yeah gaj welcome so I want to start with

how we met actually in person which was in Dubai do you mind telling us that story because I think it was quite funny

yeah of course um I mean I was really excited when I saw that you coming over as well because going to that conference

I mean I know that it’s a bit small and this was the second time they were doing Dubai I wasn’t really expecting like

known faces and then Ida was coming over you were coming over uh a couple of more people I knew so it was nice and uh

thanks for taking our time by the way uh I think we uh we had some great exchanges about like how we have been

doing these podcast and stuff like this so a lot of stuff that you have been doing were exciting and motivating so

thanks a lot for it was loads of stuff we could talk about so uh for the benefit of the audience um could you

just tell us a little bit about like typical day of what you up to I know you mentioned you have a podcast as well so yeah tell us a little bit about that

yeah sure so um I work in the mobile game industry and I’m the art director right now at Moon active uh before that

like I’m currently living in India but before that I lived in Europe so I worked at King for four years and then

two years in Helsinki in Finland uh and I worked at roio back then so my career

has started as a Cartoonist earlier and then I went on to become an animator and then I got into games I’ve done a lot

actually like also for a while I worked as a web web artist and made flash games

and websites and graphic designs and stuff like this but eventually I went into games and then I continue to be

here and yeah uh right now my job is basically to work with some tremendously talented artist and just work with them

guide them um take whatever the vision for the company is for the products and make sure they happen and apart from

this right now I’m not very socially active like earlier I used to have a lot of personal projects going around but

right now when I have some free time I dedicate it to my family but just like 6 months ago maybe I felt like giving back

to the industry so I started a podcast called Doos to downloads uh which is basically aimed at game art and I

generally have some guests come over and they share the insights and ask some question so yeah yeah super high quality

podcast and it’s the only reason that I have a video podcast if anyone sees the two episodes they can see that I’ve very

shamelessly been very inspired by it because I love the format so yeah um great podcast if anyone’s listened to

this in the art World 100% um go there and I want to highlight like I counted

on LinkedIn right before this cool 11 gaming Studios and I think the other two places you worked were the cartoonist so

like 11 just such a huge number and all doing art yeah well uh I was actually when I

completed my schooling I did not want to start my job and I came down to Delhi to

uh probably do a graduation on some programs or something like this uh and

then a company hired me as an illustrator so my career actually got started pretty soon like when I was just

17 and now I’m going to touch 40 so which is why like tons of places and

when you are very young sometimes like you don’t you don’t really look for a lot of criteria in order to join someone

is just giving a little bump to the salary and then you move because maybe you can uh buy another book because of a

new salary so so I I HED a lot I hoed a lot from one place to the other but it

also allowed me to expose to uh different mentalities different work methods and uh help me make my selection

on what I like and what I don’t like yeah and you’ve worked at some very different Studios like roio Finnish

culture King but the Spanish version so a bit of Swedish and kind of Spain culture and some big names as well so

loads to dive into well back in India I think when I was here it was pretty much

like an American culture let’s say uh India is a very company driven by Outsourcing of course right now there

are lots of companies which are making product at the moment but um back in those days like at least when I had my

start of my career the most where India was popular was for outsourcing the work

and uh having huge huge art teams like 100 200 artist that can pull off work for lots of AAA games and uh that’s

where I was so the culture was very American with the uh run fast try to get result like hardworking and everything

uh when I moved to Spain and that was also maybe of course the first company where I worked on product and or

Services um I think my perspective changed like King was an amazing company to work with and U Swedish culture like

you said so um the values were very different um they surprised me by a lot

like during my interview I was asked about a question on if you have something where um you are unable to

finish the work and the work is getting delayed or it’s not coming out well what would you do and my natural answer was

I’ll work overnight or maybe I’ll stay longer in the studio and they said that this is not allowed then what would you

do so yeah imagine like how the difference of the culture was um and I think Finnish culture was also pretty

pretty different in many ways and I think this allowed me to learn a lot of different Outlook at work perspective at

work stuff like this and change me and make me become the person I’m right now know for sure and there’s so many

different variations I feel of art depending on the studio Arts Not Alone the culture so I would like to start

with what’s a typical day for you now at moonactive as an art director H so great

question so um basically right now we have a remote team uh at the moment the

one that I lead at least uh of course we have some people who are based on the head office and also some more Branch

offices like we have one in London for example so there are some people who come down to the office and work from there but

apart from it it’s a very remote team that also means we are very globally distributed so there’s one person who

start from Vietnam and then it comes over to India where we are three people including myself and then it goes to the

the Europe region where we have people in Ukraine in in Tel Aviv in in London

and then also in Barcelona in Spain and then it goes to Brazil and to America so

the first job for me is to basically make sure that we are all connected in a system in a pipeline and how we operate

uh my General job is to basically outdir the entire team but I don’t do that all alone because it might be super hard to

be available for everyone especially when you remote sometimes you have to chronologically be available to people

depending on who wrote to you first I think that becomes the biggest challenge where multiple artists are working on

some stuff and they require your input they have sent you something on slack but you the only option for you is to do

meetings with them but you can only meet them one by one so this is where it gets harder right like some I don’t like

people to wait for even couple of hours if they are waiting for me to just respond to a very small thing and

therefore there is a like a little structure that we have done where the couple of uh game leads and like art

leads in the team as well and they generally also take care of certain segment of work overall my job is to

make sure the vision for the product like about what we are trying to achieve as an our team is getting fulfilled but

apart from that I also look upon onto lots of culture related things so I make sure that we as a team feel connected we

um uh we learn a lot from each other we are happy at work I ensure that people have good work life balance um offer

them the flexibility offer them the freedom to express themsel to share the concerns and um basically to unblock

them to unleash their productivity and apart from this whenever there’s an opportunity if I can be handson so I try

to do that It generally gets harder uh as you go further in your career ladder and uh you are more like a manager

person and of course when you have a really talented team um but it’s also important sometimes right like you you

could when you are actually being able to do Hands-On you can Inspire your people in a very different way uh

because they see that yeah like um someone did an art and I was impressed so I I take that as a Right leader so in

that case I think generally from time to time there’s always good to create some sort of opportunity is in whatever craft

like trying to find an opportunity to be handson so I generally try to balance that sometimes it’s 50% in a day

sometimes it even 0% in a day but overall in a nutshell try to um try to

be handson yeah very nice uh the thing I wanted to touch on there is the fact

that you’re Hands-On but you want to be Hands-On I guess more but you can’t you

mentioned one point you said that it’s hard for a lead to get more into the eye during your career but

when I was looking at your LinkedIn you actually went from lead to artist at King so how did that feel like you went

from being a leader to then going to an individual contributor again then it took a couple years before I noticed you

became a lead again so how did that actually feel like why did that happen yeah that that was the objective uh when

we decided like me and my wife decided to move out from India because Frankly Speaking I think I was a bit lucky and

maybe a bit too Lucky in order to become an art lead very soon in my career I

think I ended up into some companies where they did not have more senior people than me and when they saw my

abilities to manage lead guide even be the most principal artist among everyone

else like more senior even though my career was just like three years old or whatever I got promoted to be an arlete

much more sooner in India and then as a result of this until the last time when I was in India uh before we moved to

Europe Europe I was also the founder of a studio and unlike like how it happens in Europe

for example where you can challenge your lead or you can go against them or you can question them that was not the

culture in India like here um people who are higher up they just follow whatever

like the higher ups are saying to them even if they’re right or wrong and that was my problem like I was the co-founder

of the studio and despite having a talented art team whenever I told them something they always just followed

whatever I was asking them and they would barely ever give me any comment

about hey no you’re wrong maybe we should do it like this and this is what made me feel that maybe I’m not learning

enough um I think I need people who can probably be very um let’s say open and

honest about when I’m wrong because otherwise I’m I’m stopping myself so I thought with my wife that let let’s

probably like we are on more on the the giving side and maybe we have to be a bit more on the taking side so I want to

go with an empty glass and um fill it up so when we decided that let’s try to apply I I went on to apply with like

less leadership roles and just to be a person who could put a boot of like a headphones on top and just sit and draw

so that way I picked up the opportunity at king um and the initial years were very nice that way but then overall as

it went further and further um it brought me some more opportunities to continue to exercise my other part which

was more on the management and Leadership and then I continued on amazing and then you moved again

right you moved from Spain to roio was that in a different country if I’m right

yeah yeah yeah so I was at King for four years in uh in Spain and even in those

four years I moved a lot internally within King I think King is one of those companies where um internal promotions

happen your reward and all of those things so in a way you can expect that your career path is also moving while

you are there like there were structures where um you have your development plan your hierarchies and okay now you’re

artist you can be a senior artist afterward then you can be a principal or expert and then you can take the path of

leadership so in a way the organization was not stagnant for people who were there and they promoted uh these kind of

opportunities for people who were interested of course so that happened and also King

we had something called like a central art team and that was a great concept I don’t know whether it exists right now maybe it does uh but essentially that

team was not part of one game Studio but supporting all the different Studios and

I think that was very pivotal for me because by just being at King for like a

three years or two years of remaining span I got exposed to all the different game teams that came from Sweden to

London to Berlin to whatnot like in Barcelona as well and then different game projects had different nature

different leadership sh different challenges so in a very short amount of time um I mean this is what you want

right like sometimes when you’re when you’re working on one game you can end up being on a game for two years three years and of course you learn that way

as well but the central team opportunity was very unique in that way because we

were working on something for three months and then another three months to another project so in a way it allowed me to kind of like expose myself to a

lot of variety of work uh in a short amount of time and also know different people like people from Sweden were very

different from the art directors at Barcelona yeah I can imagine what was so different about

them uh I think their um the approach

and um thought processes their culture um the biggest difference which I’m

think saying like from the whole Scandinavian region also uh from Finland for example people are motivated largely by

if they are inspired by the thought I think this is how they like when I got the team at roia for example initially I

had to Bear a lot of challenge where I I thought that okay um what I know from

India for example or even from Spain if the studio head is aligned and the art director is aligned then the team

follows that’s it like that’s done right if the the leadership people are clear about what they want to do the people in

the team they just go and follow that was not the case when I moved to Finland and I saw that okay here people require

something else in order to get motivated and do what you asking for so I had to deal with it it wasn’t that I went to

the desk of a person and I said like hey go and make this and they would start to do that like no they they would

challenge they will counter question on your choices and in that case you have to earn some sort of like a relation as

well as respect like trying to get street cred like like okay you’re going to tell me this but like why should I do

it then you have to like yeah exactly exactly it was super surprising and a bit funny for me as well and it felt

like a blocker like to be very honest I was uh I felt a bit more difficult that way because like hey I have certain

targets I want to reach to them first and in that case I want the team to act upon and they they should just go and do

it but no um people want to have a lot of autonomy and in that case it was it

was a bit of Challenge and um also sometimes like the the approach can be

very different like sometimes you are maybe quality Focus versus iterative so

that’s another thing like I came up from that mindset where um at least back at King for example um I was working with a

director from Pixar and he came from Pixar and he was the visual de development director at King and working

under his leadership his vision and approach was very Pixar driven so a lot of care and quality and until it has

been perfected it didn’t move further so that became my way of working as well

however when I arrived I saw that okay here the team wants to do differently they want to arrive at good enough and

then they want to put it into the game and then maybe I trate and I trate and that’s also a very different work method

compared to uh what I came from so I had to get adjusted to it and um again

coming back from here and again coming to a place like moonactive it’s it’s more quality Focus like we are more

about perfection so I had to readjust myself that way that’s interesting I didn’t expect

Moon active to be that option like the quality cuz they make coin Master humongous game but for some reason I

connected remote Studio to make the asset and then reiterate it later but no

you’re saying it’s quality focused do you feel like there is a right way to do art um specifically for mobile games

like should you have it the quality way where you wait till it’s perfect or do you think it make sense if it’s live Ops

to put it in the game and then fix it kind of slowly later I think every method can work as

long as everyone in the studio are aligned about their approach uh they

should be clear about how they’re going to do it um they have to identify that okay if we are going to focus on quality

it will block the updates it will block the progress but then it will be perfected and then once we put it into

the game we’ll never have to come back um as often of course like feedback and changes uh even player feedback

generally arrives and all of that stuff but it’s just about agreeing on a certain setup and the other way around

can also work where you are thinking that okay fair enough we will agree on good enough and then we’ll put it into

the the game but we’ll remember that we have to polish and polish and not just leave this product as it is I think

brawl star is a great example uh and something that I was following from the early days of development of brawl star

it looked very raw uh in the very early days when um when the first prototypes and the stuff was created versus how the

final result of the uh the game is right now today and I think that they went with this approach where it was not

about just aiming to get the final result of what the game looks like right now to create from the very get-go it it

just gets enhanced and enhan the okay now these are the zones that we can focus on and we should

replace that’s interesting it makes sense like in a mobile game where it’s so expensive to test like I can imagine

making that decision where you have to invest so much into to make it beautiful and then it flops and you’re like great

thank you goodbye Millions but if you can do like the 20% version and then it is working then I guess you could

iteratively improve on that later that seems like it makes sense like thinking about that example yeah yeah my question

is about the art specifically in a mobile gaming studio you mentioned when it

comes to like doing it in an interative process but then in my head you then

have like I guess art debt like rather than technical debt you have art debt like how do you actually motivate people

to work on Art Deb because I imagine as an artist the motivation is more on creating rather than improving old stuff

is that ever a challenge it is but I I think as much as

it might look like challenging I think overall artists internally want to continue to push and Excel that’s also

because sometimes like most artists have this mentality when they go and look back at their older work they’re not

proud of it anymore because their skills have improved their uh approach and their understanding of the world has

changed and they want to polish and improve it so it it may sound difficult

but I think it’s not very difficult to inspire people and even though artists

are sensitive and emotional about their work um they are generally in agreement to replace it and discard it like I’m

surprised by moments where uh Sometimes some good artists are comfortable with

trying something that might fail and we might discard them but they want to do it like that that’s a really good thing

to do actually where uh you are open for exper menting knowing that some of this

stuff might probably get discarded and used or replaced at some point of time

and whenever we have like in any situation not just at Moon active for example but any of those moments when

you’re are working with the great set of artist and um you have matured yourself as a product and you have went further

and you realize that oh no where we could have improve the way the character

designs looked and maybe we are lacking on let’s say I don’t know the variety of Silhouettes or the level of details or

how we have been doing the lighting and stuff like that and how about if we can create and update them now I think

majority of people are still happy to do that okay so motivation not as big as of

an issue then I guess I imagined no it’s the opposite actually like they will be more embarrassed in the situation where

they have put something out in the world where which they are not proud of anymore so iterations are part of uh the

the pulse of people perfect so you’ve worked at over 10 gaming Studios so I

have a question what is one thing or process that you thought was like wow that you took with you to all the other

Studios that was kind of unique and unique way of working

H um I think there is some wow in almost every different way I have encountered

but the most common wow is again the emphasis on culture I think it’s a very

powerful tool and I realized that much later of course when I was very young I was kind of like a person who just

wanted to show off and uh be a person who would Excel and also with that

competitive mindset and then trying to um outshine overall there were moment

where I believed more in myself more than the team this is when I’m talking about like really young in my career

days where I did not knew the importance of teamwork and stuff like this

um and doing majority of heavy lifting while the team sat on the bench and they waited and they they know that this was

shir’s work like this was shir’s project and 80% influence was from there today

I’m more like a school teacher who is um generally proud of what the students are doing successfully and their success is

the school teacher success like a very general University or School uh kind of

metaphor um so the moment when that kind of like mindset changed and then I

realize that okay the what a team can achieve overall is always going to be

higher than what an individual can so how do I enable it what do I do that but that cultivated lots of like tools to

tools at work about um giving them uh trusting them first of all it start from

there like basically um telling them that hey I trust in you and in your decisions and how you’re going to do it

um it’s also uh about taking opinion from them that’s sometimes which surprises the team members a lot when

they submit something and then you go back and ask them like okay what do you like um what are your reasons and then

this is where people feel valued where they can really feel oh wow um this person is looking for my opinion and

then they sure about it you can ask about like what were the thoughts and I mean I I I encourage people to come and

express this as a pitch not just like submit something and choose something like please tell me which one do you

support which one do you want to go ahead with and also making sure that they are all empowered so they have the

right mindset they have the right time frame so a lot of moment actually involves fighting for them uh fighting

against anything that is going to affect their motivation or whatever sometimes

there are certain business decisions that get made in any companies which can probably be problematic for people even

if they know about them so as a leader sometimes you have to absorb them and then just keep them to yourself because

if you’re just a person who will just go and open up within your team to be honest about everything that’s going

around maybe those smaller incremental problems that they will continue to see that will demotivate

them on a longer go so a lot of uh moments where I have to just keep some sort of bad truth of the industry to

myself on whatever is happening in the company so that the people don’t feel that like you have to be like a shield

for them um so that way I think like I think maintaining a culture where people

are empowered supported trusted um even letting them fail and

making them know that if you fail that’s also okay uh I think that’s a that’s a very important thing you don’t to always

perform you have to tell them that like yeah it’s fine like um you couldn’t be productive today that’s okay no worries

um um it’s not going to affect you team mentality versus the individual

contributor is such a big hack I feel um soon as you start thinking like that

like I feel everyone is contributing more on their own and then it’s a weird

Paradox where you start to think about working with the team as a collective

you’d think that potentially might limit your ability but it actually does because hopefully the tide keeps us all

up and raises everyone up yeah also there’s a little principle that I

actually came across from huberman’s podcast uh Dr uh and that was I don’t know if you have

ever listened to him or I’ve emulated this podcast over Andrew hubman because my idea I want to make the hman lab

version for the gaming industry so this will be about art Direction and remote work let’s say then I can have one on

Recruitment and then hopefully the thumbnails are like ah I want to learn about this today so yes I do know him and I do really like it amazing so maybe

you might have already checked out that episode but that episode had a big impact on my style of work uh it’s a

about growth mindset uh I don’t know if you have seen it but no like whoever is listening to this podcast if you haven’t

checked that episode check it out because it’s like one hour of knowledge uh great stuff for leadership and the

simple concept about growth mindset as he describes and of course that’s Al the concept is um where you are appreciating

more of people’s effort more than individuals themselves and it’s a very

small thing but it has a big big impact so if an artist in the team does Great

Character design I don’t no longer go and say that hey you are an amazing character designer or I mean sometimes

it can be nice to say that but like how it described in the podcast it basically

stops people from progressing so you have to actually appreciate their effort more than their what they have

accomplished as individual so you have to say oh yeah you great um you did some great effort on or even you don’t need

to use the word effort like you can just say oh yeah you um you played around really nice with some proportions and

shapes and I think you tried a lot uh with great options so great and this is where you are appreciating their effort

more than calling them and labeling them that you are great or you are fantastic and stuff like this and I think that

that style when adopted can really have nice consequences on your team where they feel motivated to keep doing that

effort rather than thinking that okay they have accomplished and they are already the best uh artist for

example yeah it’s like you’re putting them in a box by giving them that compliment I feel right and that’s what you said you can kind of hopefully

unlock them and give them the gift of being able to do other stuff I really like that shift I haven’t listened to it

I just searched it and for everyone listening so if you just search Andrew human growth mindset it’s the first

thing that comes out uh I’ll send you the link maybe if you want to add to the description so we can do that in the description nice good idea fantastic so

I want to move on to the talk you did at PGC in Dubai you called it the virtual

studio so this is the first Studio that’s fully remote so what is the virtual Studio like what was the main um

takeaway you got from like putting that talk together uh yeah so when I was coming

over to the pocket Gamers uh event I was trying to decide with Charlie about what topic can I talk about and I just gave

him some options out of which one of those was related to uh how we lead the

team here at moonactive working remotely and all of that stuff and I think the topic was exciting for him so he said

like let’s maybe do around this one um so the talk is basically centered around

how we currently after covid and how we have been globally distributed have been

successful enough as a team and have achieved a lot of stuff which are

probably even not possible when you are face to face and that was a big Challenger because I wanted to compare

uh and of course there are lots of benefits when you are face to face and when you can work in the studio but I wanted to uh cover off for some

uniqueness where which are generally only possible when you all remote and um

this was based on my own life experiences to be very honest I think I mean now maybe the remote work is a bit

obsolete topic like lots of Studios have called for back to work and stuff like that of course there are still many

studios which are operating remote work but I’m not sure whether this is going to be the only future or forever future

or going to grow from here let’s see how the the time rolls out but um when covid

happened and um all of that situation happened it was really difficult right

like uh for all of us uh trying to trying to find new ways on how we can work and I was a very social artist I

was someone who used to organize lots of sketching events in the city when I was living in Barcelona uh I used to host

this club called sketch bomb bar uh sketch bomb Barcelona which was about is from the city coming over and drawing

together we almost did it every couple of week uh and it was so frequent also going to lots of live drawing events and

stuff so my signature work like my style or my identity was tied up to being a

very social artist that was also my biggest strength because artists are introverts and I was a very extrovert

person I didn’t mind speaking in front of 100 people so all of those were my biggest tools and strength and then when

covid happened it was just like oh my God what do I do now like how do how can I remain as a leader now with um all my

my wings like all my strength have been cut down um and things like this happen and then I got exposed to this game

called Animal Crossing which everyone was playing around those days I hope you played it too I don’t know if you did um

I’ve heard amazing things but I if a game looks that good I just don’t touch it because I don’t want to get another

addiction like I already have Hearthstone that’s enough addiction I know for me I know I know and super

addictive game like uh my wife and I spent days and nights like waking up at night playing the game forever but

anyways I don’t want to get into the det but the game basically allowed me to experience

virtual life in a very different way uh in a very short amount of time when we set up our Island on the game we

recreated all the real world experiences that we have had in the past into this

virtual Island that we were able to design on the game um so having a zone for live drawing having zone for sketch

bomb um doing all that kind of flex stuff like having a tour for the museum

and like a shop and all so all of those things made me feel that yeah I’m able to recreate my real life experiences

into a virtual world and as a result of it the next upgrade was playing with a lot of virtual friends who would come

over to the island and then you go do fishing with them and I felt the power of um virtual world in that way after

experiencing that game to that core because yeah um there were some new relationships which were getting made

some new friendships which are taking place just on this virtual platform um So based on this when uh when I came

back here I thought that what if whatever happens good on the on-site

world can all be continued and followed in this remote World setup even though this can be more challenging so for

example the biggest challenge on the remote work is number of meetings right like if you don’t have any control they

just go out of out of your hands and even every art artist who is not supposed to be a manager ends up having

tons of things on their calendar and they are s by the number of meetings they have to go and attend and then when

do they find times for handson so this is a challenge right but despite this and despite more

meetings getting added I wanted to continue on a few things that generally happens in real on-site scenarios for

example doing retrospectives or doing one-on ones or doing proper Sprint

plannings and um end of year surveys team building offs sites like things

which will actually populate your calendar but they will have a lot of value going forward so um I thought that

yeah no matter what I’m not going to like of course people are going to cut down on their commute time and they’re going to continue working all and um I

want them to have focus at work but I don’t want to miss out on these things created for them so um at least my style

of management still applies all those on-site experiences but then apart from it there are many ual tools that allow

us to be better and different as compared to what you can do offside which is TOS yeah I wanted to ask what

amazing tools um I think for example flexibility is one thing which allows you to just um organize yourself in the

way you want to there are lots of collaboration tools which are very powerful you can go together on a canvas

and draw together with the people so a lot of time we are able to do some brainstorming which is even more

effective than doing on a whiteboard in a room um opening up something like for example um like magma decom uh which is

like a online collaboration Photoshop so you can just go and sit and draw in it all together like everyone’s cursor is

moving at the same time and you can brainstorm and think about ideas uh all together by yourself um so all of those

things were like heavily facilitators um like stuff like this which were

empowering us to even work remotely more effectively so my top was basically focused on those things like things that

we are doing in combination to what was happening onsite but also some examples of what we can do more

remote so bringing that on-site experience to the remote world I want to

recap for the audience you mentioned three tools there so what were the three tools you used for remote work yeah so

uh basically like for example the one of them is the magma mma.com which is um

like an online Photoshop tool where you can you can draw on and also um

organizing lot on Meo I think that helps a lot like uh doing that kind of like stuff um there’s a lot of potential on

slack I think slack is um people really don’t entirely use all of the facilities

and tools but some powerful tools like scheduling messages um very very

effective uh there are times how is effective in the context of art uh not really in the context of art

but General General operation and work I would say okay so um for

example something strike my mind but I probably don’t want to send it to that person right now I want to respect that

person’s unavailability at the moment and I don’t want them to be bothered that they are obliged to response to

this right now this way scheduling really really helps and tons of my messages that I’m communicating to the

team are all scheduled they were probably thought upon at a time when um I didn’t want to send them right now but

they are all all planned for the for the groups for the individuals and stuff like that and the same applies for

remind me there’s another amazing feature on slack by the way where you receive a message and partially it

creates like a to-do list that you won’t forget so um because it’s always there

until you have mark this done like Mark this complete um and that’s very eff DM which is very powerful like I have a

to-do list to-do list so I use to-do list but I have to open it but when you

do it on slack it it’s like a DM and it’s like oh my brain has already

learned through three years of social media if I have an unread message I need to get rid of it so yeah very powerful when someone sends you like a task

you’re like I need to do that tomorrow remind me tomorrow yeah absolutely yeah and in a way you are receiving those

messages sometimes their messages are even coming when you are at work but maybe you are on another call with someone and you don’t want to forget

about this message so that was very super effective also um I was surprised

by one of my colleague his name is yarden um and he actually started

creating video feedback which was very impressive when I saw that so using earlier like uh yarden wenfield so uh if

I’m saying his last name correctly but yarden is what his first name is sorry is he using the tool called loom for the

video feed no he’s doing slack he’s using slack right now so um slack has send video message did not know that

very it was impressive and it also create transcription so it creates some aut that’s a very cool thing about Slack

like when I send a voice memo to someone I did it once and I was like oh wait it’s automatic like I have a tool that

does it for me on Whatsapp which I have to pay for but slack does it for free so very cool feature yeah exactly so what

do artl do they generally maybe create a paintover draw over um feedback for them

and then they attach a final image and then write a long caption uh that requires you to do double effort where

you have done the the feedback draw over for example but then you have to sit through and write all in bullet point

with all the description and everything but then you then kind of like combined these things a bit together by composing

video so what he what he started to do was he went on to first of all um go

over the feedback like create something on Photoshop in his personal time but then instead of writing everything down

he went for a recorded video of himself just like this podcast and it feels like a tutorial in itself where he is um

describing about the work that he have received and then the new changes that he recommends and then so it opens a bit

more like it’s not like a checklist it’s a dialogue between the person and even this video is going to get received by

the C person in a separate situation and the artist he or she will read it and

listen to the video afterward but there’s this kind of connection where the person is talking with that person directly very nice um yeah very

impressive I love using loom I use it a lot in my ghost writing business so when

I ever need to communicate okay like I added a new um course called warm

Outreach there’s going to be like rather than me telling them what to do I’m like ah I just walk them through the process

and I’m just talk to them like it’s a normal person and then on loom it goes automatically to 1.2 speed there’s a

transcription they can reply on the video overpowered yeah if I ever need to send a message that’s even a little bit

complicated I’m just going to send a two three minute Loom it’s just so much nicer and obviously we can use slack as

well yeah yeah fantastic I wanted to go zoom out a little bit here so you’ve

been in the mobile gaming space like why do you feel mobile gaming is so dominant

and what future challenges do you see it’s not that I feel that this is

most dominant I think I appreciate all form of entertainment and I find they

have a certain space um if this is about why I’m am choosing to be in the mobile

space so I’ll try to answer on that part and then also on the success of mobile why I am choosing to be in the mobile

space uh it happened a bit by choices of course by choosing the employers and then setting a focus but also I felt

that like it’s better to continue to Define your Niche and get into specialization as you go further and

further um for example first I was a very broad artist probably wanting to do

anything from mascot design to caricatures to story boards to book illustrations to whatnot and then your

focus area is pretty wide like you are doing all those kind of work but then you are not the expert of a certain

subject and when it got narrowed down into for example just games that became

an area where okay as I now go further in my career I will know more and more about the elements of games and this way

I can probably Excel more in my career ladder because I’ll be gaining a lot of information and knowledge which maybe in

the long term when I have get gain more experience no one else will have the same knowledge so naring D is always

going to be helpful so it went on two games for to start and begin with and then in the games it opened into genres

where okay where can I go like platforms um mobile is one console is another slot

games in another for example board games are another so again naring D and then going onto mobile games and even in

Mobile right now I mean currently at least I’m focused on casual um and that

actually still makes it even more Niche and even more specialized in a certain things because then I can just closely

observe what happens on the Casual landscape I can just get to know more about what do the audiences like how do

game companies work in the Casual landscape what are the kpis what are the lingos that people use in the company

when they’re developing a casual game in that case acquiring more and more knowledge limits you and restricts you

but also allows you to be more specialized and uh more focused like a laser beam uh I think that that’s

generally um overall helpful in my opinion as you continue to specialize

because then you become a bit more unique and um that way but about mobile

games in general being dominant well it’s true I think it’s uh one of the biggest industry I mean of course I’m

not like a business person so I can probably describe that in a very uh business language but um looking at how

the consumers pay for electronics and all of that that stuff have been the form of entertainment like how it

continues on people have very less attention span uh barely people like sit

and watch through long forms of films um obviously there’s still like this media and all I think that cares um games in

general and also a huge amount of audiences who just want to have a little bite-size fun in that case like mobile

games offer them this kind of like relief and relaxation between their work before they’re going to bed so you can

do a lot of your your uh life erands in between all this thing you can just continue to play games that way it’s a

um it has a great kind of like a factor uh which is very different from the

focus it needs in order to watch a movie or read a book for example so that way it’s an incredibly interesting industry

and also performing very well commercially at least as of now we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future there are also ups and downs um

but uh yeah it is is currently a successful Revenue generating platform

yeah yeah I mean I’ve only been in the mobile gaming space as a recruiter I

used to recruit Unity developers pretty much exclusively and whenever I was

seeing like where the money is Flowing I always felt like mobile was the place I usually dedicate some of the part of the

podcast especially near the end to young people so if you’re let’s say you have a

son he wants to go into AR he’s like hey Dad there’s AI coming in up there’s less

jobs now it’s 2024 what do you think I should do if I want to get my first role like how should I become a good artist

what do you think I should be doing I I think at least definitely in my case I’m going to go very traditional approach

I’m going to um let him do the foundation in Basics and have all of

those things strong enough uh then it’s upon on how the world has progressed and

went further like a lot of people say kids should not watch television they should not look at the screens and stuff

but really like sometimes maybe there are certain benefits like if you totally

keep them away from using iPad or whatever then in a way you are also restricting them from what the

technology allows you to have today like they they’re not experiencing procreate like I don’t want my kid to like not

know anything of those at all he should know what’s on the television today what’s uh what content and shows are

most watch young people what what age you thinking there like are you thinking like Teenage I was thinking cuz that’s a

good idea like if you want to become an amazing artist you get like an extra 5 years on procr at age 13 you’d be probably killing

it uh yeah I mean even more younger kids like I think my son is right now 3 years

old and he still goes to procreate and I teach him the tools and he’s he’s learning about 20 years once he’s 23

he’s going to be like yep I’ve been drawing for 20 years that’s amazing yeah that that’s funny

is yeah yeah no that actually makes a good point like we have that for sports

right no one says anything about the kid who’s been exercising since 5 years old and then wins the Olympics at 20 but

they literally became an adult two years before that but they’ve been training for 15 years so yeah it’s a good point

like if an artist is involved in it then just start I guess yeah soon I think

fundamentally people should be still aware of the choices I think those aesthetic knowledge and those things

should exist uh even I encourage people to possess classical knowledge like not

about the medium I’m talking about even what happened in the history like uh even if it’s of no use for today it’s

always good to know how the art evolved what were the movements what were the dec which led to certain formation of

those art forms was it war was it politics was it human and

advancement um how those movement happens I think those things are always always important and if you are able to

combine what happened in the past with what’s happening today and what can the future have unfold for you you you can

be just very unique in yourself which uh which will put you further ahead of anyone else

exactly amazing so in terms of I guess art directors so maybe not the art so if

I’m an artist and I want to become a great leader like is there any lessons you’ve learned about being a great

leader that you wish you learned sooner I think

the the biggest thing that comes to leadership and our Direction in general and also being successful at it is

decision making I think and this is a difficult thing to actually teach anyone because you can’t give them examples

about okay in this case make this decision uh it’s always something that will come practically in front of you

and those who are able to make the right decision right point of time are able to

succeed further they have more success results they they are they accomplish more and then when you you make uh bad

decisions or wrong decisions then obviously it slows you down on the career or you have a more disappointing

experience at certain places or you feel lost or locked or you want to come back I think this is this is the only thing

which is hard to learn or even like hard to know but anything that is going

around at your work always leads to some choices like the choices to either do

this or do this sometimes the choices are not to prioritize this but to prioritize this or to try this and not

to try this like things like these and these are generally the the moments where you have to just choose and if you

choose the right option among all of those options which would lead to success it’s going to go well for you

those choices are less encountered when you are as an artist because then you can rely on your lead to tell you on

what how we should do this but as a director you have to make those decisions and that can fail your company

or fail your studio or uh solve the problems and survive your studio so that

that’s basically my my take overall like um having the the right ability to make

the right decision in time um I think that’s that’s the fact which I believe is integral for an art director so if

decision making is integral like how do we make the right decisions like you mentioned making the

right decision in time is there a time element here like we shouldn’t wait too long to make

decisions sometimes it comes around maybe not about time in general like obviously naturally you have to make

decisions right in time like um you can’t delay it too long but um it’s more

about sometimes the decisions are influenced by how your past has been uh you might have encountered a very

similar situation uh which may makes your brain think that yeah this is this is the danger zone and this is where the

the result may come in so I should try this and I should not try this sometimes it’s more about now your your gut

feeling says um let’s uh let’s probably not do that um

so it’s hard I think some of the stuff is based on your past experiences but some of the stuff is when you evaluate

your current circumstances when you know what the stakeholders are going to feel if I make this decision

how risky of a move this one is how much can I trust on the success percentage if

I’m going to choose this kind of path with the with the artist and this is where you probably go and say hey L the

work is being expected today but let’s do this until tomorrow it’s on me I’m I

know I’m taking the risk but I think that if we show them today we will get some amount of feedback which will delay

Us by two days and then the work will finish in couple of days but if we take this cushion and then work until

tomorrow and do this this and this then probably tomorrow when we go for the review we will have an instant approval

so I’m just giving a very random example but like these are the kind of like decisions and situation that come around

you where you have to choose what’s right or not sometimes it driven by the style sometimes it driven by the um the

concept that you have created like stuff like this it’s it’s just that you have to choose you have to choose a lot on

almost every moment so I guess getting in the Reps maybe or seeing what decisions your leaders have

made and figuring out why that’s the only thing I can think of to kind of get ahead of yourself rather than learning

on the job which I feel like many people do in the games industry like you get promoted to a lead and they like good luck so if you want to get the muscle

before then just understanding that decision process sounds important yeah

yeah also there’s like a stepping stone where from an artist you get into the direction role and

this is where some of the characteristics of an artist come into play like those who are more organized

uh more systematic more responsible more trustworthy I mean I’m not saying that like others cannot be

trustworthy but it’s like the kind of like relationship where you can build that the the stakeholders of your

company can trust on giving you the the the title basically or even sometimes

the title don’t come like in many cases the title don’t come um you have to be in that role for a certain period of

time and then it naturally comes to you um that happened with me many times like

I was not crowned as a arlete to start from it was just that I was doing everything that an arlete should be

doing and therefore it naturally got assumed that this person is an not lead and then the atar had to reconsider to

put that title onto the paper so uh this is how it goes but I think those are the moments where when you are organized

systematic even when you have an equalent peer uh in your team is probably at the same title at the moment

but if you are giving them inputs if you’re guiding them if you’re are supporting them uh this is where people

see that yeah she or he has a trait for being leader I think that’s important to

reiterate you were an unofficial out lead before you got the promotion so always I think this is always the case

yeah it’s never going to be the case where um no I will only exercise or show

these traits until I’m crowned like it never works like that I think it’s always is about already starting to do

that into your studio raise your hand be the first person to come forward and

then take initiatives and do all of these kind of like things and then you are seeing as a as a person who can lead

it amazing I think that’s just something that’s just very worth mentioning that’s applicable to everyone like I’ve heard

so many people talk about their promotion trajectory and it’s always been through stuff like that where

they’ve raised their hand said yes did more things and then people like we have to give you this promotion cuz you have

I want to give you more responsibility it’s like almost like a gift to give you the promotion so that’s the situation we

want to be in yeah yeah amazing how do you wind dying after like drawing for

like eight hours like what do you do off to work oh yeah um So currently I

generally um spend time with my family when I’m back home especially with my kid he’s always waiting for me to to

come around and play with him um also generally trying to help him

draw I think he’s a he’s a big inspiration for me that way when when I see him committed I think children can

teach you a lot if you see from that from angle on how they can do attitude

and how their problem solving one of the biggest thing that I talk with my wife about how children are a great example

of when they’re practicing something they can perfect it so that’s that’s something that always gives you a lesson

so I think I’m more on the student side whenever I see him that’s uh that’s one of the good thing apart from this on the

weekend sometimes recording podcast sometimes um I mean I have my studio for

myself so generally I’m exploring some tech gadgets and reading a book or um

playing some games with family and friends uh I’m a big time board gamer so once in a while we organize some board

game sessions at home and some friends come in and it’s like a time when we are away from the screens and devices and

just having a great time so that’s that’s mostly like it I used to travel a lot but not doing that as much as often

right now um I wish I can do more you coming to Gamescom oh actually I am traveling to

Thailand around the same days you still traveling then that’s so good yeah yeah yeah but next year for

sure uh I’m really looking forward to it yeah yeah nice it be good to see you there sh thank you so much where can

people go and find out more about you and your podcast uh so about the podcast it’s mainly on

YouTube it’s also on more audio platform but the video one is the one where I’m most focused on so it’s on

youtube.com/ dool to downloads uh that’s the name of the podcast apart from it

I’m on LinkedIn I am available on email uh sometimes I do accept some

meeting invites on cal.com so if someone wants to have like some sort of like a portfolio review advice or whatever they

want to hang out and ask some question so I let them choose a slot from my calendar and just book like a 15 minutes

half an hour whatever um so yeah LinkedIn and YouTube amazing thank you

so much anything you want to leave everyone with anything that we didn’t cover today um not really I think the only

thing which I would like to say is be a better person more than be a better uh

person in profession or craft so I think that’s that has a huge important in this is what the world needs right now uh so

always make those right choices where you are being kind and uh helping the world be a better place I agree and if

you are like me and you want to make it a bit more optimistic sorry a bit more salesy it is selfish to be selfless if

you have that mindset good things will happen to you anyway so it’s even a good reason to do that so that’s a great way

to end it thank you so much absolutely thank you a lot thanks a lot Harry have a great day