Let’s cut straight to the chase; these articles are not going to tell how to make a build system for AAA games, or implement a feature using a piece of tech. There’s plenty of How To guides out there on the internet behind the Google search box for that. There are also plenty of people smarter than me who can tell you how to do it better than I can anyway.

What I am going to try and tell you is why things are done the way we do them or hopefully highlight some of the reasons that your Build Engineer tells you things aren’t as simple as you thought they were going to be, but are unable to communicate exactly why without a couple of hours of explanation.

What I am also going to try and tell you is that this absolutely critical role in the games industry has grown and is not as simple as it used to be, based on years of experience doing this job. I hope that you find it insightful and valuable.

I am writing this series of articles to try and highlight some of the standard problems that we have and why it's no longer as simple as just writing a batch script and putting it on a loop. Over the years I've learned that one of the hardest problems in our role is one of the oldest in the known universe; human communication, so I've decided to try and make that part of the problem easier to solve by openly discussing some of the other issues here.

I’m not a professional writer so if these articles may come across as ‘chatty’, I apologise for that in advance and assure you; I’m not an AI (yet).

These thoughts are entirely my own and are not an official policy of any company I currently or have ever worked at.