Blair Trusler

What inspired you to choose the MSc Computer Games Technology at City St George’s, and how did the programme help shape your early ambitions in game development?

After completing my undergraduate in Applied Computer Science at another university, I tried applying for games industry jobs. Unfortunately, I had only created one game project as part of my final year project so I found it quite hard to find a job in the industry. As a result, I searched for MSc courses specifically focused around games and found the course at City to specialize my knowledge and build up a portfolio of games and code samples for my CV.

The course was really packed full of useful modules, most of which contain fundamental information that I still use to this day. Each module helped me build up my portfolio of work so that when it came to applying for jobs it was a much easier process. On top of that, I felt very prepared and confident as I on-boarded to my job at Rockstar.

Which skills from the course, such as programming, graphics, physics, or engine development, proved most valuable as you began your career and progressed to Lead AI/Gameplay Programmer at Rockstar Games?

The C++ programming and maths modules were definitely the most valuable for starting my job at Rockstar. All of our core AI/Gameplay code is written in C++ so it was crucial to have a good understanding of the language as well as the fundamental math principles used in video game code.

Additionally, the Game Engine module and the Final Project were great at giving me an understanding of how game code should be structured in order to be performant and maintainable, which is very important when working on large projects such as ours!

In what ways did the MSc prepare you for entering the games industry, and how has that foundation supported your growth over 12 years at a major AAA studio?

The course gave me a very holistic view of game development with its wide variety of modules. This has been extremely useful as it gave me confidence to speak about all facets of game programming, even the areas I do not work on day-to-day such as Graphics and Physics.

Some parts of the coursework were also great as it gave us half finished code projects to pick up and finish. Being able to pick up a project and then have to study/understand it and then pull it across the finish line is a pretty common thing as in the industry people’s workloads and priorities often shift about across team members.

How do the skills you developed during your MSc continue to influence your work today?

I think that the variety of coursework and modules from the MSc helped prepare me for the amount of context switching that I need to do on a daily/weekly basis; you really need to jump around and switch your mindset to a lot of different areas!

Which module or technical area of the programme had the biggest influence on the way you design and implement gameplay systems today, and why?

The game engine module really opened my eyes at how code structure and readability/maintainability is important. As you continue to develop your systems you need to constantly be thinking ahead about potential feedback and changes that may need to be done, so writing easily maintainable, modular systems is crucial.

The module was my first exposure to profiling code which is another thing I have to do regularly to ensure any changes I make are performant.

How did the MSc help prepare you for building complex gameplay systems in large‑scale open‑world games?

The various modules gave a great overview into all the core building blocks of complex game systems; hierarchical state machines, behaviour trees, avoidance behaviours, pathfinding etc. It really helped to give me a solid understanding of all these areas in a complex game environment.

What achievement or feature in your career are you most proud of, and how did your studies contribute to the expertise needed to deliver it?

I’m extremely proud of the work we all did on Red Dead Redemption 2. It’s such a special game to me and I feel like it really stands out as a unique gaming experience. I worked on so many areas of the game so it’s really hard to pick out just one achievement or feature!

What advice would you give to current and prospective MSc Computer Games Technology students who want to follow a similar career path?

My main bit of advice is to try and build a portfolio of small game projects and code samples that you can point to on your CV. Not only will this help you stand out, it gives you something to talk about in job interviews.

Thereafter, when looking for jobs I would strongly recommend trying to apply for positions at companies that make the kind of games that you’re interested in. Game development, particularly AAA development, takes a long time; you don’t want to be stuck working on something for months or years that you have no interest in playing yourself! Of course, this is all easier said than done - so I can only recommend not giving up!