Andrew Olsen a concept artist at Robot Entertainment along with programmer Shovaen Patel have been featured on the AIAS website. AIAS is the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. The prestigious website features studios that are part of the over 20,000 strong academy. These interviews are some of the very first to be featured on the website and give a great insight into how Andrew and Shovaen broke into the gaming industry.
Andrew graduated from the Ringling College of Art and Design with a BFA in Illustration and went on to join n-Space and worked on numerous Nintendo DS games. After 2 years he decided to travel back down to Dallas and found his way to his home at Robot Entertainment working on all six games released by the studio so far. Thats Age of Empires Online, Hero Academy, Echo Prime, Orcs Must Die! 1 and 2, and Orcs Must Die! Unchained.
Getting to work on Age of Empires Online was a great experience. That franchise is very nostalgic for me. I even remember being in 5th grade and Age of Empires was the first game on our family computer. I wish I could go tell my 10 year old self that I’d be painting concepts for an AoE game in the future!
Shovaen studied at The Guildhall at SMU studying video game software development. After graduating he scored a job immediately at Robot Entertainment and hasnt looked back since.
It ended up being an easy decision, because Robot is an awesome place to work and an incredible place to start a career in games, with our history and our core group of veteran developers.
He is currently the Robot looking after the programming of the bots in OMDU.
Be sure to check out both of these excellent interviews over at the AIAS website on the link below. Many interesting topics are discussed including where they think the industry his heading in the future.