Meet Bruno, Technical Director
22/11/2023
How did you start at London Studio?
I joined London Studio in 2012, as a Senior Graphics Programmer on an unannounced PS3 title. I eventually moved to the engine team, who were starting the work on our new PS4 technology. It was later used in VR Worlds and Blood & Truth. After Blood & Truth I led the graphics team on the effort to refactor our tech for PS5 and eventually moved to the role of Technical Director.
What does your role entail?
As Technical Director I oversee the engineering team at London Studio, both in development of our internal engine (named Soho) and our current project.
Various, amazing tech leads report to me, each of them leading a specific area of our team such as tools or rendering, among others. Together we work through issues, define priorities and set goals that will ensure our team has what they need to work efficiently. We’re raising the bar in all areas of game technology, to deliver something that will blow minds. I also collaborate with the team on our rendering tech to keep my coding addiction under control. 🙂
What do you find most exciting about your work here?
We’re working on very exciting tech. That for me is key to my enjoyment as an engineer. As a studio we have a “brave“ value that we really live in the tech team. We haven’t shied away from throwing away all legacy PS4 code and starting from scratch when we felt it was necessary for pushing PS5 to the limits in areas like ray tracing. Same thing when it comes to our game. When we identified what the game pillars were and what we could do to make it shine, we built our network model, tooling and others to maximise that. There’s still lots of opportunities to innovate and our team is always looking at what the next big thing is, so it’s never a bad time to join in.
What has your career path looked like over the years?
I started in an indie team (I was the only programmer at the start), were we worked on several small prototypes. Eventually we shipped our first game (a small PC puzzle game) which got us our start to then grow the team and move to shipping some Nintendo DS titles, which later worked on PS3 as well. During that time, I led the growing programming team and did some game design, even writing duties on some of our games.
That studio is unfortunately no longer around, but after a while I moved to the UK where I joined London Studio.
Do you have any career advice or top tips for people that would love to work in your role?
I would encourage people to focus on their portfolio. Education is great but having a solid portfolio you can share on GitHub, personal website or anywhere else makes a huge difference to allow an employer to see where your passion and interests lie. Leverage publicly available presentations and papers from events like GDC and Siggraph to learn and try to put something together.
If you’re interested in graphics, you can also use services like ShaderToy. If gameplay is more your thing, then trying to replicate mechanics from your favourite games in something like Unity, Godot or Unreal. They are a great place to start. There’s lots of possibilities and no wrong answers.
If you could describe London Studio in a few words, what would they be?
People and culture. The studio is all about these two things, and they go hand in hand to create a working environment where you feel supported and encouraged to be your best self, while surrounded by wonderful and incredibly talented people.
