We are gamers.
Our artists make games, play games, understand games.

How Do We Do It?

• What are current outsourcing problems?

  Art sourcing in general, or any outsourcing, doesn’t normally increase your company value, on the contrary. In something as important as art, it make you dependent on external team, that you don’t control.

  Moreover, many companies tend to give you a senior initially so you’re happy and sign the contract but slowly move the senior away to a bigger/different contract and fill the spaces with juniors, the changes are gradual and your quality suffer.

  Berkana has another proposal, we strongly believe in Lean principles and we believe that senior rotation in your team is a waste, you want a person that owns and loves your project as much as you do.

• So we offer to extend the team for you, in a way that you “own” the person working for you, how does that work?

  We super charge your team, if you have a senior artist or an art director somewhere in your studio. We assign our artist to work directly for him/her, no middle management, no producer, we give you more hands on deck for you to use as a resource, not to just have output over email.

  We integrate with Slack, discord, or whatever you use, we attend your daily meetings, have video calls, etc.

  We are familiar with Jira, Monday, Asana, or any other.

  Moreover, we fly the artist over for you, they work with you, get to know your team and they stay as long as you need them. Once you feel they are ready, we bring them back.

  Of course this is optional. We also do complete remote work.

• How do we create a pipeline?

  Our artists has been working for several companies already, helping companies like Tactile, Pixowl and Gameloft, not only doing assets ,areas, characters but also designing the proper pipeline to ensure smooth work, fast feedback and specially reducing waste. Meaning, we work producer less, if you have one, that’s perfect! But we always find ways to empower artists to bring their work to the final line, an artist job doesn’t finish in photoshop, their work is done when their assets are integrated and shipped.

  So concretely, we first aim to identify the needs, then we breakdown the steps to get it done. We have very versatile artists so we aim to have as less steps as possible.

  Once we identify that, we do a value stream mapping that we validate with you. We try to understand if that time/process looks like something we can make work together. If you’re happy with that, we put special efforts on having minimal round of feedback but very effective. We always aim to have progressive feedback meetings, that once something is approved we move on down the stream.

  We can send you some examples if you want of value stream mapping we did in the past and how they worked.

• How can we do art direction for you? What’s the benefit?

  We get this question very often: Why will I outsource art direction? The answer is clear. Whoever you have in the payroll right now probably likes and it’s very good at one particular art style. If you want to have a market fit product you know that, doesn’t matter what we like, it matters what your audience like.

  Today is very common to do a focus group or a quick screenshot campaign to see which art style has better CPI (Cost per install) or IPM (installs per mille) so you may need many different art styles (or at least a few) and very quick.

  Your artist may be excellent for a Diablo type of game, very bloody and dark and magical, but if you happen to be doing a game for a female audience, you may find yourself in a problem, and worse, you will end up settling for something that looks “good” but may not be the right fit.

  The best way to test several art styles very fast is to have several art directors pitching you styles, colors and concepts. You don’t have several of those…we do. We have several art directors that comes from very different angles and expertise, they’re the perfect mix to give you something you can work with.

  We offer you options, then you settle on what you want and what works best for you. If your art director can mimic that style, even better! If he can’t, we are here to keep helping you and direct until you either find the right person or you keep on working with us.

• Fast onboarding?

  Sometimes a company needs fast mercenaries to come in, render some props and move away.

  We are very fast, we can start and scale in days with smaller projects such as weekend projects to just a week worth of work? Why do we do this? We obviously prefer long term relationships, but reality is that sometimes you just need the work done to get over with your vertical slice. We are here to jump and help you with that.

  It doesn’t come cheap though, but it will save your deadline.