Hello!

My name is Robert Ilott and I'm an Engineering Manager in the Games Industry. I've been in the games industry now for 12 years, most of which have been at Electronic Arts, specifically Criterion Games (but most recently at MediaTonic, an Epic Games studio). I've been involved in the shipping of 13 full titles and one extra special Star Wars VR experience, specialising in the mysterious role of the Build Engineer. I've also been involved in many other titles that didn't end up shipping, but still required the full infrastructure and force of a Build Team during the prototyping and ideation phase.

Over the years I've worked with some truly amazing people and teams in order to ship these titles and I'm super proud of every team that I've been part of working in, developing or building up. If you'd told me back when I started working that one day, I'd be credited in a AAA game (let alone a Need For Speed or Battlefield title!), I probably wouldn't have believed you.

During this time I feel like my teams have had to deal with some very common threads and I started to write a few articles about these subjects. But I had nowhere to put them so they've basically just languished in my google docs folder for years. So now, I'm revising and updating them and putting them somewhere for people to read them. That place is here, titled "Just a batch script".

I've also been through all of the games that I've worked on and taken screenshots of my name in the credits as I realised it's been ages since I'd last done it and have missed the last few games - it's normally something I do at some point in the dev phase when I'm checking all my team have been added correctly. If you also work in the games industry it's OK to admit it - we all have our ways of checking we're there 😜

Finally, I've recently created a group on LinkedIn for games industry build engineers. If you're a build engineer in the games industry or you were one, aspire to be one or maybe want to hire your next one; go HERE.