ANDREW KITE

SAE graduate Andrew Kite has gone from strength to strength since completing a Bachelor of Games from SAE Melbourne. He now runs his own games development company, Random Studios, and has recently celebrated the release of their first game ‘Randy’ on the App Store.

What inspired you to enter into the career you’re in?
I’ve been a gamer all my life, Goldeneye 64 would have to be one of the first games I spent hours playing as a kid, but it wasn’t until I played Halo back in 2001 where I wanted to make games myself. I really only started making games when I started at SAE in 2010, before then I was simply reading developers articles on the processes they took, or collecting ‘Art of’ books.

What are your fondest memories of your time at SAE?
I was in a class learning Unreal Development Kit (UDK) for the first time and we had to form groups to create a map over the course of 12 weeks. After our team discusses what the environment should look like, one of the artists creates this sketch which blew us away at how great it looked (in just 10 minutes!). Needless to say, after that the team was immediately pumped up and ready to get to work. I got to work with some pretty talented people that semester, and the work that we were all producing and the level of motivation was pretty great.

Are you able to shed some light on how studying at SAE lead you to where you are now?
A major aspect of the games industry is being able to produce quality work in a reasonable amount of time. The games industry constantly changes and you have to be able to keep up with the change. Due to the course’s structure and assessment timelines, SAE definitely given me the skill sets to produce quality work within reasonable timeframes.

What are your career highlights?
A big highlight for me has been the launch of Randy on the App Store. The team I managed put all their efforts into Randy, learning new skills outside of their expertise, to working long hours in order to meet deadlines, but in the end we believe it was worth it. Another great moment for me was releasing a solo project I worked on for three weeks as part of the VRJam hosted by IndieCade, called H.M.W.S. Being my first project developed with the Oculus Rift, it was great to see some positive feedback from gamers and other developers.

What projects are you working on at the moment?
I’ve started development on a new mobile game which should hopefully be complete in a few months. This project will be a solo development process to help push my portfolio even further and to learn and develop new skills. At the same time I am designing smaller, simpler games within Random Studios to keep adding to our catalogue of games.

What advice would you give to students aspiring to become successful in their field?
Work hard. Build up your portfolio. Connect. As with any field, working hard to become successful is a given. Continue to develop your skills and learn new areas of games development you may be unfamiliar with, whether its design, art, programming, or sound. Build up your portfolio with all your best work and continue to update it. Also build up your connections in the industry whether it’s by communicating with other game developers or people in the media. Connections are important whether you’re going to go off and do your own thing, or try and find a job.