Kat Berkley @KatNicoleB Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

@mil_gile

@UniofExeter

@roproleague

@MarieWithDDs

@dmm_keirin

@atfidar

@zscl_

@Preston

@JanganGoyah

@lange_rosi

@crm_mxm

@Angel55409

@HrtBrv29962

@_CFTA

@CPCOofficial

@camwebb_22

@Melissa13190163

@AhnikSaur

@umb_bps

@nilpering

@emma98281_emma

@Avukile

@MRadford_HEECN

@kiho33040

@obuchikiku34554

@SalfordUni

@kthxia

@stwmaniax

@TeVeelGevraagd

@damintoell

@RevRichardColes

@HerefordRaces

@MannyooNic

@deepinthebusch

@ReturnOfKappy

@f0rphilm

Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

2 years

I just want more scifis where people flip switches and punch buttons instead of touch touchscreens

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 months

Weird. After I massacred all my golden geese the eggs stopped coming. Anyone have some advice?

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

4 years

This is going around my theatre nerd friend circles on FB and it's amazing The designer drew the stripes on the dress with fabric markers instead of trying to work with patterned fabric This is the most gamedev type of solve to a real world problem I've ever seen and I love it

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

ADHD artist tip: try drawing your loose "first pass" sketches with absurdly fat/blunt PS brushes at first to keep you focused on defining the major shapes only and to keep you from getting hung up on fiddly little details. Set a 5 or 10 min time limit for each "first pass" sketch

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

4 years

My opinion after managing artists for several years is that artists do better work when they have slept well and eaten well and taken care of themselves. Think about how hard it is to cut with a dull knife

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Here are some of my best tips, tricks, tools and strategies for surviving in a creative field and producing art/creative ideas on a regular schedule while struggling with ADHD: a MEGATHREAD (Caveat: everyone experiences mental illness a bit differently. YMMV)

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

6 years

#PortfolioDay

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

7 months

My prediction for AI is thus: it won't live up to the hype but that bubble won't burst until AFTER many execs have already gone all in, cut most of their creative staff, and gotten themselves locked into expensive AI subscription contracts

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

4 years

Apologies to every level designer who was told stuff like this was too on the nose

@MileHighBrendan was here (and still is sometimes)

@MileHightheGrey

4 years

Back at my office for the first time since March (to pick up a new monitor, replenish office supplies and whatnot), and wow — check out the time capsule I inadvertently left for myself, yellowing in the sun by my window since Thursday 3/12, my last day working at the office. 😳

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

4 years

Video game fans: "why do gamedevs keep making the same mistakes over and over? Why do they never learn???!!!" Video game industry: *enacts grueling labor practices that churn through fresh grads and push mature devs to leave*

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 months

Two things: -I think the game industry is way too consolidated -I don't think Game Publishers should be allowed to own Game Development Studios Look at what happened to Hollywood under the Studio System back in the early 1900s

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

4 years

'bout to upset every environment artist who follows me

Bela Lugosi's meds🔥

@GarbageGangHQ

4 years

Interior Design is my passion

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

I've been looking at a lot of game art portfolios lately and I wish I could give game students a crash course in how to build a better portfolio because I think there are schools out there that are clearly failing their students 😨

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

4 years

@austincantdrive The venn diagram of "don't worry, you can take your mask off" folks and the "don't worry my dog is friendly" folks is a circle

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 months

Please donate an esim if you can. It's less complex than you think and the folks organizing this over at Operation Olive Branch wrote a very simple tutorial. Esims are often the only way some of the evidence of these war crimes are being recorded and shared right now

Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 months

A lot of the cell phone footage that's getting out of gaza right now is getting out because of donated esims. Here is how to donate

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

4 years

@shereeny The spike strips that prevent you from reversing back into the parking garage

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Video game Producer

Jack Donaghy Wisdom

@DonaghyWisdom

5 years

What do you call this job?

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

6 years

I know a whole lotta folks who left AAA gamedev because it broke their heart too many times to have to yank their kids out of school once again and move cross country for the umpteenth time. A lot of them have spouses who can't keep jobs either because of all the relocations

Jessie Lam _(:3 」∠ )

@axl99

6 years

What tilts me off about execs getting fat bonuses is the human cost of laying off whole teams of devs who gave their company their wealth to begin with. Doesn't matter if they ramp back up. This disrupted lives, careers, families, and also projects because now they gotta rescope.

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

3 years

Day 1 of importing NFT assets from one game into another: they load upside down and at 2000% the scale of anything else and then immediately brick my machine

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Watching formerly vibrant queer art Twitter begin to fall prey to a bizarrely puritanical brand of micropolicing is a trip. The queer art community here are eating one another alive over tiny missteps while the old boy's club chugs on as unconcerned as ever

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

2 years

I tipped these punk street musicians like 50 euroes. No regrets. INCREDIBLE voice on her!

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

2 years

Digital artists watching the price of graphics cards crash along with crypto

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Trying to focus on making video games during a global pandemic

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

3 years

I can almost hear the generations and generations of my West Virginian ancestors screaming in the back of my head telling me this might be a bad idea 🤔

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

3 years

I don't think unionizing the game industry is a magic bullet that will solve everything but I think that a theoretical gamedev union could fight to address several issues that make the industry a hostile place to women and other marginalized devs. For example it could:

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

6 years

Hey Twitter, I'm Kat Nicole Berkley! I'm a concept artist, illustrator and photographer from Baltimore. I've worked in video games for 11 years. You can follow my art at or #VisibleWomen

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

4 years

What if space but also fashion What if we could all be high tech space ballerinas gracefully wielding space swords

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

4 years

OK so my current hot take is that throwing diverse representation into media or doing diversity training is merely a bandaid and things will not significantly improve in games until marginalized folks actually hold real serious money and power

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

4 years

Galaxy brain: unwrapped straight lines look distorted on curved surface so draw curved lines on distorted surface to fake a straight line look

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Sometimes I think about some of the Concept Artists I looked up to when I was a student who gave me bad advice like "just make sure it has cool shapes. Let the 3D modelers figure out how it works." Those Concept Artists are all Fine Art Painters selling their art in galleries now

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

2 years

The clips are from a show called Gunbusters and the TikTok is from an acct called @ hanahakiblank over on that sm

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Something I wanted to reflect on: Lately I've been trying really hard to level up my skills when it comes to depicting a lot of different physical body shapes in character designs. In this Broken Earth character lineup sketch I did I had a chance to practice that

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

4 years

Source:

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

2 years

This is why I hope they don't ban TikTok 😂

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

6 years

Every day I get to tell a high school kid "Game studios don't care about degrees. All they care about is your portfolio. Spare yourself the crushing debt" in front of their parents who are clearly expecting me to tell their kid to "stay in school and go to college" is a good day

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Thinking about how even brief periods of crunch can cause lifelong health problems for game developers When I crunched during my senior year of college I caused irreparable harm to my wrist and had to get surgery. I have daily pain and I'll never be able to fully bend my wrist

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Strategy 1: Make peace with the fact that when your ideas are flowing you will never be able to capture them all. Don't run around like a person in a wind machine desperately trying to catch dollar bills. Accept that some of your ideas will slip from your grasp and that's OK

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Yeah well us kids don't want to die because we can't afford healthcate

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Strategy: How to draw something when you feel frozen or stuck in a loop. The problem is you want to draw but feel like you're stuck scrolling through social media or gathering reference or re-arranging your desk and OH GOD SUDDENLY THE WHOLE DAY HAS PASSED AND YOU DID NOTHING!

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 months

An AD would reject this concept for being a bit too hamfisted and on the nose for a game about a police state

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Here are a few things to try to help get out of the loop and actually DO THE DRAWING. Put on some music and tell yourself that your pen will hit the paper as soon as the song starts. Set a timer for how long you can reply to emails/look at social media and when it buzzes stop

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

The ideas will always come one day. They will never leave you forever. Treat your ideas like a river that you sometimes visit. There is too much water in the river to ever catch with your small bucket but what you are able to collect from it will sustain you

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Game art students, You should be posting wireframes and unwraps in your portfolios. Sculpting is only part of the workflow Seriously Please

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

3 years

"why are there so many game developers who have ADHD?" 🤔

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

When I started out as a young artist I found that I would have long spans of time where I made nothing and then sudden bursts of ideas that I would let flow out of me until I was utterly exhausted and spent. I soon found working like this doesn't work well in school or at work

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

3 years

I see discourse about crying at work and I've gotta say the job itself (gamedev) has never directly made me cry but the stress from low pay has. I was paid too little to live on at Irrational and the worst at-office cry I ever had was when I got a call about a car repair bill

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Don't desperately try to cling to and record every thought and idea you have while wondering "IS THIS THE BIG ONE???" Don't live in fear that you will have a great big idea and then if you miss it or forget it you will be dooooomed. Accept that you will forget lots of cool ideas

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

I honestly believe that if you're interested in leading teams in gamedev the best thing you can do for your team isn't to learn the latest shiny new tool pipeline. The best thing you can do for your team is to start going to therapy

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Several years ago I made it my long term goal to work hard toward becoming an art director on a AAA video game title. Today my own title was officially changed from "Art Manager" to "Associate Art Director." It feels good to be aknowledged

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

3 years

Holy shit I love this so much IMO the world needs more ultra dark ultra sad Christmas songs

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

6 years

Every time we lose established devs in their late 20s, 30s, 40s and more due to this kind of layoff/relocation/burnout cycle we as an industry lose valuable knowledge and experience. This is why dev is so overwhelmingly filled with young people who keep reinventing the wheel

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Segment your day so that distracting tasks that you tend to "loop" get limited to very specific windows. ie- "I'll answer as many emails as I can from 9AM to noon but from lunch until 4PM that's my special drawing time and I can't do emails or anything else"

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

-make really cool stuff -exercise -full social life -go on dates -have a clean living space -eat meals that don't come from a can You may only choose two

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

3 years

I've been struggling to collect my thoughts about the very visible person in gamedev who was outed as an abuser recently and I think what I keep going back to is what many BIPOC devs have been telling us all along: beware of 'women in x' groups led by mostly white women

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

6 months

The game industry is currently undergoing this same hollowing out

Dare Obasanjo🐀

@Carnage4Life

6 months

Boeing is an example of the observation that by the time you realize you've made a strategic mistake, it's too late.

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

As an artist I refuse to do programming unless you trick me into doing it by turning the programming interface into a series of cute little boxes I can hook up to one another with wee little cords

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

3 years

😀Person 1: The glass is half full 😩Person 2: The glass is half empty 👩‍💻Concept artist: I have prepared 20 glass designs that I believe capture the spirit of both half full and half empty. Please select the glass design that resonates most with the feel of the narrative

Osama Dorias 🇵🇸✊🏼

@osamadorias

3 years

😀Person 1: The glass is half full 😩Person 2: The glass is half empty 🤷🏽‍♂️Game designer: As per the design specifications the glass should be full. Please provide full repro steps and frequency so that we may investigate.

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

3 years

I didn't put any gel in my hair after washing it after surgery and now I look like a Gearbox character

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

6 months

@edzitron I saw an amazing TikTok about it this morning

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

I feel like Jean Paul Gaultier really knows how to speak to concept artists

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

My personal strategy is I do my first pass sketch with an absurdly thick PS brush and then I erase it until it's very faint and I pick a slightly thinner brush and make a second pass with a bit more detail than the first then I erase that one and go w a thinner brush and so on

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Strategy: Drop as many plates as possible. When you have ADHD you can feel really anxious that you might forget all the things you have to remember to do and holding all those thoughts in your mind can feel a little bit like you're spinning a bunch of fragile plates in the air

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

3 years

OK. Ummm.. Y'all. This is not a drill. I've found a TikTok account with the greatest Blender tutorials available the internet 👀

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

It's a blessed relief to just go ahead and write down all the shit that I "should be able to remember." Writing stuff down is not admitting defeat. It's using a helpful tool so I can free free and unburden my mind enough to get lost in a painting

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

The really really REALLY hard thing about having ADHD as a concept artist was that I had a super hard time regularly producing those rapidfire ideas in a way that was consistently reliable and followed any kind of "regular" schedule. I had to develop some strategies to adapt

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

4 years

What the level looks like in blockout before the concept art department hits it

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Earlier this week my therapist wearily turned to me, sighed, and said 'lots of dungeon masters have been coming to me for treatment lately but I really wish their players got therapy. It'd make my job easier' And if that's not a mood

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

In light of my GDC talk about bra and corset physics being accepted to phase 2 I'm just going to embrace this and make it the best bra lecture that ever existed. Please tweet me examples of egregious and terrible bras and corsets in video games that should never have existed

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

ADHD strategy: schedule "discovery" or "play" time. One of the things I found myself struggling with due to ADHD is that I can find that I let the things I "need to do" grow and grow to fill up all my free time until I find myself without any time to have fun or play

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 months

A lot of the cell phone footage that's getting out of gaza right now is getting out because of donated esims. Here is how to donate

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

2 years

@Cosimania 🚩😳 "no is not an acceptable answer"

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

The same dollars passing around an artist community

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Strategy: Limit art tools to ONLY what you need. With ADHD I found myself spending an absurd amount of time doing things like picking the exact perfect brush from a list of hundreds of other brushes in Photoshop. To stop this I made a series of limited brush "short lists"

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

As I grew as an artist it always seemed like other artists had an easier time than I did and things were more effortless for them. I always felt like I was about to drown. These are some of the things I invented in my head to keep myself afloat:

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

First off, clarity is WAY more important than a fancy website. Can the person looking for your art see your art immediately without having to hunt and click through a ton of confusing menus? Make sure your art is front and center

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

3 years

I hope one day there is a backlash to all the current media about medieval stuff being brown and grey and we finally start to see bright colors again

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

4 years

@michael_kamper A... Are they only recruiting fifa devs?

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

I've spent most of those past 10 years in video games working as a concept artist and a few of them as a Lead and an Art Manger. The kickass thing about having ADHD as a concept artist is that I got paid to come up with LOTS OF IDEAS REALLY QUICKLY

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

As a Lead Concept Artist I ended up cutting up my day exactly like that whenever possible. I found it super helpful to try to limit all meetings/feedback sessions/email replies to the mornings and then deliberately schedule the afternoon as "painting time only"

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

4 years

The digital art community is under no obligation to re-embrace anyone who endangers students and colleagues. This is a man who preyed on people he was supposed to mentor. If we as artists allowed him back into our spaces we would be failing those we are supposed to protect

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Me, waiting in the woods to offer the player characters a cursed ultimatum at the crossroads

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

6 years

Game studios are few and far between. When a game studio has mass layoffs most devs who got laid off will likely have to move cross country or even to a different continent if they want to work in AAA again. To top it off many studios are located in super expensive cities

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Finally, if your college professor forces you to use Wix or Behance or some weird and confusing formatting... Make the terrible website they want you to make, turn it in for a grade, and then take it behind a barn and shoot it and make your REAL portfolio website better

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

@FromHappyRock @subtle_squid So I think a lot of the 'should artstation allow porn' discourse misses the point entirely. It's not nude bodies that make people feel unsafe. It's the systematic dehumanization of women that is allowed to fester in erotica aimed at cis straight men in a male dominated industry

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

4 years

It's hard to envision a blossoming of nuance and artistic introspection growing within the thin soil of an industry that continues to discard those who have already learned the hard lessons

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

@FromHappyRock @subtle_squid Being a queer woman in game art is... Walking into an office where guys expect you to accept the boob-shaped stress balls they have on their desks as routine while knowing that if you dared put one of your own erotic drawings in your portfolio you might never get a job callback

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

It can feel like a disaster if you drop one of the plates. (ie-"OH GOD I FORGOT TO PAY THE MORTGAGE!") The way I stop myself from existing in this fragile state where I'm precariously spinning all these plates is that I write a ton of stuff down on calendars and in notepads

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

So, first off, a bit of context: I've been working in video games for more than 10 years and I only learned that I have ADHD during this past year. All of these strategies are things that I have found have helped ME but you may personally find other coping methods more helpful

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

So, after listening to some pilots run through a series of checklists before takeoff on a plane I flew on once I had this weird idea: "Why don't I just make Art Flight Checklists for my art tasks and run through my Art Flight Checklists before I send out art for approval?"

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

6 years

We're throwing away some of our most brilliant minds in AAA every time we have a mass layoff just because they're human beings who want to have stable lives in addition to doing their very best at the job they love

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

If I'm not careful I can spend all my free time doing work tasks or cleaning my house or doing chores etc but the problem is that as a creative person I NEED to spend time playing and discovering because that discovery playtime is often when I learn and grow the most as an artist

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Another thing I did that helped me find time to play again is that I started making lists of cool things I wanted to do or see and then on the weekend I made it a point to always pick at least one thing from the "cool and fun things to do" list and then actually do it!

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

2 years

When the players try to interact with your UI for the first time

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

What I found is that sacrificing this single hour didn't make me a worse employee or put me behind on my tasks. Deliberately setting this special hour aside to sketch freely led to me being more creative and more experimental and generating even better work faster

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

If you need this structure it's (in a healthy work place it should be) OK to be vocal about it and set boundaries with your coworkers. Explicitly say stuff like "If we can try to avoid doing meetings on Thursdays that would help me a lot. Thursday is my Painting Focus Day"

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

3 years

Day 2: someone realizes that there is hidden text on the inside of a sleeve of a flightsuit that the company doesn't have a license to use and then we all get sued

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Kat Berkley

@KatNicoleB

5 years

Don't have the ability to build a website that makes your art easy to access? Something free like Artstation is fine. In fact, something like Artstation that just puts your art front and center on a very visible grid is the ideal format to shoot for

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