Case Study: Bugbear Entertainment achieves rapid multi-platform continuous integration and per-file asset builds with Incredibuild

Moving from long-running nightly builds to continuous integration with multi-platform asset builds using SCons and IncrediBuild

Bugbear Entertainment, an independent action game studio in Helsinki developing for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, was hampered by long-running nightly builds that broke often, slowed collaboration between programmers and artists, and made multi-platform asset processing impractical for continuous integration. To move to frequent CI runs they adopted SCons for md5-based dependency checks and brought in Incredibuild to provide distributed build processing and out‑of‑the‑box support for SCons, Visual Studio code builds and PS3 automatic interception.

Incredibuild powered a build farm (six quad‑core machines joined to ~64 GHz of processing) and distributed asset and code builds on a per‑file basis, enabling ramdrive optimizations and proper incremental SCons builders for textures, geometry, shaders and data. The result was a jump from one platform build per day to about 20–30 builds per day per platform with ~15 minute turnaround, three code configurations plus assets and simple tests per build, far better build stability and faster fixes — and a clear improvement in team morale thanks to Incredibuild.

Bugbear Entertainment

Timo Kämäräinen

Technical Director