Interview with Ron Kayima on Game Design

What are your names?

1. My names are Ronald Kimera Kayima

Where did you go to school?

2. I moved around a lot so I studied in many places I did my high school

education in both Kenya and Uganda in Kenya I went to Peponi secondary

school and in Uganda I went to rainbow international School of Kampala.

After high school I did 2 years at KIU

What did you study?

3. In KIU I was studying information technologies, but did not complete my

3rd and last year. Before that I also did a 6-month course studying Cisco.

Tell us about what you do?

We heard that you are game design?

4.Currently I am a game developer mostly working with Unreal Engine by epic

games I focus mostly on blueprinting I also create music as a hobby which

has come in handy with the game making process.

What are some of the major influences in your past that are determining

what you are doing now?

5. I would see some of the major influences that have determined what I'm

doing now spring from my love of comic books which actually is my original

job description I am a comic book artist which helped create the stories that

we are using to make games today. Another major influence is I have been a

gamer ever since I was a child I started off by playing Sega mega drives and

nintendos all the way into the release of the first PlayStation to the current

PlayStation Xbox games I have been around the block of gaming for quite

some time and it is a personal passion. I would say that I am also big in story

writing and I take a large interest in African history and mostly mythology

anything based around human creation gods and the lesser gods and their

duties and just basic stories of interest I love reading about heroes of the

past warriors of the past and that was a big inspiration for a lot of my comic

book stories and really has helped create intense epic storytelling in our

video games such as Sunjata trumpet of last day. Sunjata is a story that I

have been writing ever since 2004 and the entire idea was not to really create

a story but to create a world which multiple stories could exist. This is

probably very heavily influenced by my love to watch anime and Japanese

movies.

Tell us about what kind of training someone needs to get involved in game

design? What are your favorite games?

6. When we started game development we actually had no idea how to

create a game and basically learning as we go so the biggest training

manual that we received was from YouTube we got a bunch of tutorials and

use those to basically create the first versions of the game while also

learning how to use the Unreal Engine at the same time other softwares were

involved of course and I managed to meet a really great 3D artist named

Hannington kisembo and that has been the working relationship that has

produced Sunjata up till today. So based on this I would say the best type of

training anyone would need to learn how to do this with just be passion you

must have a passion to want to create games and from there any tutorial

can point you in the right direction. About my favorite games well I would say

I have many but if I was to narrow them down it would most definitely be

killzone, God of war 4, street fighter, horizon zero Dawn and Halo.

What do you think about the Technology and Innovation Ecosystem of your

country? What does the ecosystem look like in game design? What are the

major players? What are you looking for from readers? Investment into

your game?

7. Personally I think the ecosystem is very lacking in collaboration. I think

there are tons of talented creators in the industry but not enough people

working together to create epic and high quality content. I think they are a

couple of entities though that are trying to achieve this such as the tribe

Uganda who has been consistent in The annual event that DG art fest where

they tried to showcase and really put a spotlight on the ecosystem and

community in this digital world in our country. I think right now there's a big

spotlight on animation and film a lot of great projects coming out and we're

hoping to also open up that area in gaming I would like to say in eSports

there has been a very large climb due to entities like arundem gaming but I

think we can do even much much more. Sofa it's been around 6:00 coming to

7 years in development and I think the takeaway I would like people to have

from what we've been doing is that it is possible for a small team to create

something as photorealistic and AAA quality as Sunjata hopefully this will

inspire a new generation of game developers to even raise the bar higher

and take it to the next level.