A roller-coaster ride

In my previous blog post, I mentioned working on securing my post-university future. I was reluctant to go into detail because at that point I found myself in the middle of months-long recruitment process with the dream company I wanted to work for way before I knew what Game Art was, and nothing was 100% confirmed at the time. I received an internship offer weeks later and funnily enough, the words „Hired at Riot Games“ headlining the confirmation email still sound as surreal to me now as they did back in March.

To put this into context, Riot Games is one of the most well-known studios in the video game industry, with an estimated 100 million active players enjoying its main title, League of Legends and many more now being attracted to its newly released titles – Valorant, Teamfight Tactics and Legends of Runeterra. To work with the stellar art team Riot houses would be considered an honour to any game artist. I think my gratitude for that opportunity is also enormously amplified because I’ve played and loved their game consistently for more than 7 years now.

As I mentioned – I received my offer in early March. At that time, the western world was just beginning its deep dive into the pandemic chaos. Throughout that month, I still had a significant hope that things will calm down and everything will go as planned. I was supposed to move to the US for the summer and work in the dreamy, fully Riot Games themed Los Angeles campus which would surely seem better than Disneyland to any avid player of the game. Alongside finishing my degree, I focused on sorting out a visa and mentally bracing myself for having to add colour to my 100% black wardrobe which would most certainly cause me a heatstroke after few days in sunny California.  Well, that thought sounds quite naive now.

With lockdown measures finally reaching the US, Riot was amongst the first wave of companies to go fully remote. The campus was closed and I started to fear the worst - that the internship will be cancelled. Fortunately, the team of Rioters organising the internship are total badasses who managed to shift the whole internship programme to work-from-home setting. At the moment I’m in my UK student flat, waiting for my IT equipment to arrive from the US and I’m so very excited to start working in the next few days. I won’t lie, I am still often sad that I won’t get to be there in person – at times it gets difficult to convince my brain that I did not just make this all up, without any tangible proof (on top of my already very real imposter syndrome) – but I know I have to make the best of it and hell, I have so much to be grateful for. I will still get to work with the most awesome team of people I got to know so far, on the most exciting projects I could imagine, for the game I’ve loved the most since my teenage years, and I’m in happy tears just thinking about that. If anything, this situation is an incentive for me to work my hardest and try my best to secure a full time spot there in the future.

Now that my university journey is over, I would like to thank the Kellner Family Foundation and my family for their generous financial support in my studies, allowing me to follow my path and reach my goals without having to worry too much about living costs – that took a huge burden off my shoulders. A special thanks goes to my mom who is an absolute star and has always had my back, especially when things got tough. And of course to everyone else who stood by me and believed in me when I did not believe in myself – granny, dad, auntie, my amazingly talented and hard-working little sisters, and my dear friends. Your support helped a lot and got me out of the deep downs of that roller-coaster many times.

Phew, a wall of text again, and I consciously tried to keep it short! To liven it up, here are some screenshots from the projects I worked on in my final year. I also found some screenshots from my university application portfolio and from first year, and I thought comparing the 3 year progress might be fun :)

Final year projects (2020)

Application portfolio and first year models for comparison (2017)

Lastly, if you’ve reached this far, I just wanted to use my small platform to share these links – it is important to help and show our support against still shockingly real issue of racism in any way we can. Even if you might feel the particular issue does not affect Czechia, racism in various forms does visibly exist there, in the UK, the US and every other country on the planet – and has existed for far too long. Every one of us should stand up against it – this is not about politics, it’s about human rights and their blatant abuse. The least one can do is educate themselves on the matter. Netflix is currently streaming this chilling, insightful documentary for free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8 . It is infuriating how much is left out of history books and to this date I don’t understand why I have to have the names of Mesopotamian rivers Eufrat and Tigris engraved in my memory, yet I have, throughout my whole high school education both in Czechia and in the UK, not been taught a single thing about Black History, a topic from which real, current issues stem and still affect people in horrific ways at this exact moment.

 You can also research ways of donation https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/ , sign petitions or take part in protests and discussion: https://www.vogue.cz/clanek/society/tym-vogue/spravedlnost-pro-george-floyda-jak-muzete-pomoci-at-uz-jste-kdekoliv .