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Meet Raccoon's Recruits
Raccoon's Recruits are talented folks who've completed work experience with us and are ready to bring their skills to your next project!
Oyku Erdenlig (she/her)
Artist
Concept Art
Animation
Art Direction
Oyku created expressive 3D character animations and proactively contributed ideas, often sharing quick 2D sketches to guide discussions. She iterated well on feedback, aligned her work with the game’s cosy tone, and quickly upskilled wherever needed. She also designed, modeled, rigged, animated, and implemented a super cute frog character matching the style of our game in Blender and Unity.
Oyku Erdenlig (she/her)
Artist
Concept Art
Animation
Art Direction
Oyku created expressive 3D character animations and proactively contributed ideas, often sharing quick 2D sketches to guide discussions. She iterated well on feedback, aligned her work with the game’s cosy tone, and quickly upskilled wherever needed. She also designed, modeled, rigged, animated, and implemented a super cute frog character matching the style of our game in Blender and Unity.
The Pilot
At Panda Cat Games we piloted our Raccoon's Recruits program over the course of 2025. The industry is very difficult at the minute, and we've had an influx of people reaching out to volunteer so we wanted to find a way to help early-career and marginalised game developers.
As this is an unpaid experience (we are a pre-funded start-up and not earning any money), we wanted to make sure it benefited the volunteers more than ourselves. We set up a pilot to make sure we were being intentional and fair by listening to participants and iterating throughout the year.
How it works
The Program is completely self-directed. We help Recruits set their own projects when they join in line with their personal goals. If we ask them to do work outside of that, we pay them for it at a junior rate.
Minimum 8 hrs
per week
We commit time to you in exchange for your commitment in return.
Self-directed
learning
Manage your own project and timelines, deliver presentations and a development diary.
Access and Mentorship
Full access to our projects, meetings and network.
Guidance for other studios
Part of the Pilot was to figure out how to make this manageable alongside development and running the studio. This was totally do-able by following these guidelines:
-
No more than two Recruits at given time
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Each Recruit stays on for no longer than two months
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The program is completely self-directed (with effective documentation and processes)​
If you're interested in learning more about the program, please get in touch! We'd love to work with other students to scale this to help more people.
Beyond 2025
We're discussing internally what the Future of the program looks like based on learnings from the Pilot.
Follow us on our socials to be notified any any updates regarding the program.
Testimonials
Some feedback from our Recruits Alumni that participated in, and helped us shape, the program.
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