How to take calculated risks
My guest this week was another fellow podcaster, Kshiraj Telang. He is currently working at Moon Active as an Art Director and he worked at some of the biggest gaming companies such as King and Rovio. He also has a great setup for recording podcasts which made me a little embarrassed if I’m being honest.
As a seasoned artist who has been in the industry for quite a long time, Kshiraj didn’t start his professional career in gaming. He was working as an animator for digital agencies at the beginning of his career and what helped him transition into gaming was the fact that he joined events that let him display his work for companies. Through sharing his work with others, he started working with small gaming teams to help them with their animations, which led him into a slower transition into gaming. As a much repeated suggestion in Game Dev Diary, connecting with the community and showcasing your portfolio pays dividends that you cannot easily plan ahead.
Since the games industry has grown a lot over the years, it is not really feasible to set up shop in an event to share your work with others. But what you can do to take your first step into gaming is using the online tools available for displaying your portfolio. People are connected more than ever through social media and other means, which unlock a lot of different ways to display your skills to start your own journey. Kshiraj’s advice here is to be diligent about your portfolio, to make sure it reflects its full potential, and it remains relevant with your latest pieces of work. I think it is extremely crucial to take care of your online personality and your portfolio holds a very important place in that.
One of the things that helped Kshiraj improve himself over the years was the fact that he was brave enough to take risks and tackle new challenges. Everyone lives a different life and has their own limitations, so this doesn’t mean everyone is expected to take the same risks. But, the important thing here is to realize your own limitations and the resources you have in terms of time or effort or money in order to take the right risks. For some, it is moving abroad for a new opportunity while changing roles within the same company is big enough of a risk for another person. As long as you understand your situation and keep trying to take calculated risks, you will continue improving yourself.
As many other guests in Game Dev Diary have mentioned before, being proactive and trying to do extra things help you a lot with respect to going up in the career ladder. It might be as complex as helping your manager figure out a difficult problem or as simple as organizing a complex folder that everybody has been having issues with. Once others recognize that you are willing to take initiative and solve problems without being prompted, they will start trusting you more which will eventually lead to better opportunities in terms of progressing your career.
Being willing to do more and take risks is definitely a great way to constantly challenge yourself. And challenging yourself is the only way to grow and become better, so our discussion with Kshiraj showed a great number of ways to contribute to the path of continuous improvement. Of course, none of these things are trivial, they all require a lot of patience and effort. But the results in the long term, as always, make the whole journey worth it at the end of the day.