Sharkmob

About Sharkmob

Sharkmob is a Tencent owned, full-fledged AAA game studio that develops and publishes its own games. Sharkmob’s three games are powered by Unreal, have strong online multiplayer components, and are developed for PC and console. The company’s first release was Bloodhunt, set in the Vampire: The Masquerade universe. Offices in Malmö, (Sweden) and London (UK).

The Challenge

Sharkmob’s games are massive multiplayer experiences and require constant and fast updates. This includes syncs up to 15 times per day. The company’s dev teams were being slowed down by builds that were too long and impacting developer productivity (and their experience). The team sought alternatives to accelerate their builds but had little luck finding something that was ready to use out of the box and is consistently reliable. The company also has 250 developers working across the globe that need to be able to work fast and have access to compute power on demand.

How Incredibuild helped – Accelerating CI pipelines and reducing build times

When Sharkmob switched from their previous open-source solution to Incredibuild, the teams started seeing fast results. The company’s dev teams run several compute-heavy processes – unity and non-unity builds, static analysis, shader compilations, and cooking assests – and have started using Incredibuild as a key part of the process, both in their overall CI pipeline and their development environment.

Sharkmob’s teams also use Incredibuild 10’s flexible licensing as well as Build Cache, which allows them to allocate power and cores to whoever needs them, no matter where they are or when they need it. On average, Incredibuild was able to shorten build times from approximately one hour to just three minutes. This kind of flexibility gave Sharkmob’s team the ability to upgrade the version of Unreal Engine they use to fit their dev needs more specifically. Instead of having to plan for extensive downtime and updating, devs can simply push a new build – whether it’s a minor feature or a core system – and test the results immediately.

In terms of Continuous Integration, Sharkmob was also able to boost productivity, especially with the team’s system of using “preflights” that lets them complete a whole dev cycle before they have to submit a final copy.

Bottom line

Using Incredibuild, Sharkmob was able to significantly upgrade its developer experience. The company was able to create more stable builds faster, iterate more frequently, and customize their Unreal Engine tools to fit their needs much better. The company was able to reduce builds from 30-60 min to roughly 3-4 min per build.