Cryptic Studios

About Cryptic Studios 

Cryptic Studios is an industry leader in game development with over two decades of experience creating free-to-play massively multiplayer role-playing games. With its headquarters in Los Gatos, California, the studio’s portfolio boasts acclaimed titles like City of Heroes, City of Villains, Champions Online, Neverwinter, and Star Trek Online. 

The Challenge 

Game development requires rapid iteration and robust build processes to ensure code integrity and timely project delivery. During its early years, Cryptic Studios was seeking a reliable solution to expedite the game engine and build process compilation. As the studio expanded its reach from developing for PC to developing games for consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation, the need to iterate faster became increasingly important for both server architecture and game client development. To tackle this issue, they decided to turn to Incredibuild. 

How Incredibuild Helped 

Cryptic Studios made the easy decision to use Incredibuild for its business operations as the software is a well-known and highly regarded industry platform. Incredibuild proved to be an invaluable tool, allowing the distribution of extensive workloads across multiple machines, which enabled faster iterations and timely outputs for artists and designers to playtest during business hours. This has strengthened the company’s core operations. 

The importance of Incredibuild became even more evident when Cryptic Studios shifted to remote work in 2019. Teams without access to the software experienced a noticeable lag in build times compared to their equipped peers. Furthermore, Incredibuild proved to be effective even on local machines without VPN connections, reducing build times for legacy games from 2 hours to just 15 minutes and even more for live games. 

The deployment of Incredibuild Build Monitor has also been instrumental in providing comprehensive insights into build provisioning, resource allocation, and core utilization. This has simplified the provisioning of machines, allowing for quick and efficient modifications. Additionally, the company has explored using Incredibuild to handle their Unreal Engine 5 shader compilation, which was a significant part of their build time, as well as the map binning distribution. 

Bottom Line 

Cryptic Studios has been using Incredibuild for over 17 years, and the software is deeply integrated throughout the organization. From developers to software teams, build farms, designs, and QA, everyone benefits from the software’s accelerated build times. On average, Incredibuild saves 2-3 hours per developer, leading to increased productivity and creativity.