From Sailor Moon to Pokémon Cards: Rianti Hidayat in the Japanese Game Industry
There is one moment from her middle school years that Rianti Hidayat remembers clearly. She was playing Suikoden. At a certain point in the story, she cried, struck by something she had not expected. "I had no idea a game could go that deep," she said. From that point, her direction was set. She was going to work in the game industry.
Before Suikoden, her pull toward the visual world had already started earlier. When Sailor Moon was making its rounds among her elementary school classmates, Rianti began drawing the most natural way anyone does: by copying. From tracing the original characters, she moved on to making her own variations, including one she called "Sailor Flower." When Cardcaptor Sakura came along, she pushed further, redrawing every Clow Card one by one in watercolor and taking requests from her classmates while she was at it.
By her own description, she was the kind of student who drew in the back pages of her notebooks regardless of what subject was being taught. Her parents worried. But that worry did not change her course. When the game industry in Indonesia had not yet really taken shape, Rianti explored anything connected to visual art. She made comics and sent them to Animonster magazine. She worked on romance novel covers and dental textbook illustrations. She even built out a complete game concept, with a logo, characters, and a world, without a single programmer involved. That concept eventually became her final thesis project.
After graduating, she moved slowly but steadily. She volunteered at international events to find a way into the industry. She worked at Ubisoft for a time, then applied for a scholarship to go to Japan. Today, she is living that life.
The path was not straightforward. As an international student, she knew her Japanese was no match for local graduates, and hiring her meant extra complications around visas. The only way to stay competitive was through the work itself. She had to build from the ground up, through personal projects that carried real stakes. That portfolio eventually landed her the job she wanted, and also won the Indonesia Graphic Design Award in 2017.
Rianti's process begins with research, and this applies to every project, whether she is working as a game concept artist or as a freelance illustrator. "When I was working on illustrations for Disney, I had to break down the character: who is she, what is her personality, and what illustration styles had already been done. The goal was to avoid overlap and keep the result feeling fresh," she explained.
That research can get very specific. If she is designing a house, what materials is it built from? If she is designing a character, how tall are they, how large are their hands? Those details matter for building context and making the created object feel alive.
On the subject of references, she sets no limits on the medium. A random sticker on a utility pole can be a source of ideas. But one study stands out above the rest: she once spent time closely examining the brushstroke techniques of American painter J.C. Leyendecker, and the results showed up directly in her current illustration style, including in the Pokémon Trading Card Game cards she has worked on.
As a concept artist accustomed to working across many different IP types, from realistic to highly stylized, Rianti does not have a single fixed visual style. "If you visit my Instagram, you can see the range is quite wide," she said.
Rianti gives a clear picture of how her work spans different territories and how challenges arrive from different directions. On the Lorcana Disney Trading Card project, the pressure came from outside: high standards, layered revisions, and colleagues who were veterans from Pixar and Disney. "Honestly, I sometimes felt intimidated and frustrated when I felt my skills were not quite at their level, while the demands of the work were so high," she said. But it was precisely that project that pushed her past her own limits.
On the production art for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the dynamic was the opposite. The Zelda team was open to any idea, and the challenge came from within. "How do you create something unique enough that the client laughs or gets genuinely excited during the presentation?" she said.
On the technical side, the part she finds hardest is rendering and polishing, and it has nothing to do with capability. She gets bored easily at that stage. What she enjoys most is problem-solving: pushing through the early creative work of generating ideas, concepts, and compositions. Once that phase is done, the polishing process feels long and draining. Pre-production, she says, is where she feels most at home.
When it comes to the creative industry in Indonesia, Rianti sees it with two different sets of eyes. On one side, she sees real progress. There is Jumbo in animation. There is Coral Island and Coffee Talk in games, local titles that have broken into global markets. When she used to tell people she studied visual communication design, they assumed she was going to be an architect. Now there are many young people whose goal is to become an illustrator.
But she also acknowledges the problems that remain unresolved: underpayment, a curriculum that has not fully caught up with what the industry actually needs, and, most recently, the arrival of generative AI shaking the whole field.
"It is still quite hard to live and pay the bills one hundred percent purely from drawing," she said.
Even so, she is not pessimistic. As a judge at various CG competitions, she is regularly struck by the quality of work coming from young Indonesians. From that, she has a clear sense of where things could go.
"Even with limited support, the quality is already this strong. Imagine what it could be with full backing from all sides. Indonesia has real potential to become an art powerhouse in the future."
Rianti knows firsthand what it takes to build a career from nothing in an industry that had no clear path. And perhaps that is exactly why she can picture, with some confidence, where that potential might lead.
