I’m Kyle and I’m a 28 years old who has finished studying at AIE in 2015.
I was born in Melbourne, but moved when I was 1 and grew up in the country in a small town called Mount Beauty and then moved when I was 21 closer to Melbourne again.
I’ve been interested in games from a very early age and was always begging my mum to buy me a pc even though she couldn’t afford it. So at the age of 6, my grandparents bought me a PC which came with space invaders and a bunch of other games that I loved. From that day I have always been a PC gamer with over the years having only a few consoles and handhelds such as NES, Gameboy, PSP, PS2, PS3 and Xbox 360 but would pick PC as my favorite gaming system.
I also loved drawing, I would draw for hours every day mostly just cartoons. I was never really good at copying images I liked and I never traced and when I did, I didn't like it very much so most of the time I would just draw my own cartoons. I use to borrow bits and pieces for some of my cartoons such as the shoes Sonic use to wear. At the age of 10 I stopped drawing as much as I use to due to getting put down by two class mates, back then I agreed with them and gave up, but now I wish I had kept going with my drawing and I encourage others to never give up and to keep pushing themselves.
I also upload videos to YouTube, first it was just something to do and would at least share 1-5 videos a day, but for getting too many strikes the account got deleted. The highest viewed video I had was a music video I had created and back then I didn't have any fancy video editing software so I couldn't cut clips and such for when I made this music video (which was clips used from the movie “The Warriors” and used the song “Crack Addict” by “Limp Bizkit”. It had almost 150,000 views before I got to see it for the last time and was quite popular. I then started another channel but over time I felt I had done too many wrong things (having a 30 second intro on each video and having it listed as HD when it wasn't). So then I made a new channel called HDBacon which I currently still use to this day, I've also got partnered by VISO Games, though it doesn't bring in too much but I like to upload my 3D work sometimes up there to share with friends and family over the internet.
I first started editing games in 2001 at the age of 11, and over the years have modded games such as Swat 3, GTA III, GTA Vice City, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3, Manhunt and Max Payne 2 just as a hobby as I had no real idea on 3D or game design of how you did it and how it was done.
As I was in my last year of high school I saw a poster while day dreaming, it was a poster about AIE. It was perfect it seemed it was just the thing I was after the only thing was I was 5 hrs away from where it was located, so I never really thought I’d find myself at AIE, which was due to not having any luck of finding a job and being very very limited place for work and friends having their own plans of what they were doing and where they were moving to.
But that changed in 2012 when I moved closer to Melbourne and even though I was a little bit nervous about doing it, I pushed myself and signed myself up.
I did certificate II & III which was to make an animation in the 10 weeks certificate II went for and for certificate III you had to make a 2.5D platformer game. At first I thought maybe 3D wasn't for me as I didn't like the way my stuff turned out and I had a bit of trouble to start with but in the end I got the movie finished (just) and then when I jumped into certificate III and made a game I felt good about it as i was happy with the end product and enjoyed it a lot more and felt I had came a long way compared to when I first started due to knowing how it was done and how much I could do, rather then biting off more then I could chew.
I graduated from AIE in 2014 and I'm going to be studying Vocational Graduate Diploma of Management (Learning) in 2015 which is also with AIE. I will be working with 2 other artists who I met while studying at AIE and a programmer who also studied at AIE.
In 2015 I was working with some friends and a new person we had never talked to and started to work on a few games, Faith, Belief and a 3D Maze game. We started in Feb but sadly in June there was complications, problems with our group and we fell apart.
I now work for AstroBear Games as their Market Admin I also do work on the website and also deal with the computers for the team and additional paperwork and game testing for our games.
At the end of 2015 I graduated my Vocational Graduate Diploma of Management (Learning) course and now working outside of AIE with AstroBear Games working on titles such as Shepdoog and Bombzey Island.
At the start of June 2016 I left AstroBear Games due to not being able to afford to come in to work and work for free anymore and at the time were not making any money just yet. I then set off to try and upgrade my IT skills in hopes to get a job as a IT Support Tech but it was also not meant to be. I have mainly been focusing on looking for work and working on my YouTube videos for HDBacon.
As of 13th of August 2016 I started my own business as an IT Technician servicing PC's as well as an on call cleaner.
As years went by I forgot about this website, since my last post Ive been a cleaner I was there for 2 years, I was going to be studying game dev programming but the course just wasn't for me so now I am offering my IT services in a new location living in Ballarat.
I also worked as a Service Desk Analyst at PROBE Group for about 5-6 months and am now currently trying my hand in making games again as of Jan 2020.
Shortly after my post, the covid-19 hit and most of us all know how that was like...guess I will update this again once something exciting has happened and we are back to "normal" living.
I started to try games again back in 2023 as AI has started to boom and I am able to get an AI to write scripts for me. Over the past 3 years I've been playing around with AI upscaling, Deepfaking, exporting models from games and giving them animations from Mixamo. Who knows if I'll keep updating this....who even knows if anyone reads this?
Later towards the end of the year I started giving Unreal Engine 5 a go. I've been somewhat successful with making a game, it's currently in Alpha stage and I'm not sure if I will get everything polished and up and running in the end, but I have learnt alot.