Art Director Aspirations with Reika Yoshino

This episode was Sponsored by Autodesk.

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“I naively thought that these things won’t happen to me and if it does I’ll be able to navigate around it. Unfortunately, when it did happen it was a lot more difficult then I thought it would be”

Reika Yoshino is a Art Production Manager at ThatGameCompany currently working on Sky: The Children of Light. It was great to catch up with Reika and learn about her story going through the game industry. She overcame many challenges such as immigrating to Canada from Japan at the age of 11 to going to college in the states when she turned 18. We also go over her strong sense of affirmations after witnessing the game Journey in her senior year, the game produced by the very company she now works for at a leadership position.

Topics discussed in this episode:

0:00 Autodesk
1:12 About Reika Yoshino
3:41 Leaving Canada to work in the US
8:40 Challenges of working as a non-citizen
9:30 The lure of tech companies vs game companies
13:12 The road to ThatGameCompany as a Art Manager
20:45 Transitioning from artist to manager
23:36 Experiences from being a female in the game industry
31:02 Imposter Syndrome
35:40 Trajectory for Sky: The Children of Light
41:10 Thoughts on fully remote, hybrid, or back in the office
45:00 Games as a service
48:22 Being a part of a hit before it’s a hit
51:40 Aspirations of becoming an art director
55:53 Shout out

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

• https://twitter.com/heartbreika
• https://ryoshino.artstation.com
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/reikayoshino/