Case Study: FromSoftware slashes game build times from hours to minutes with Incredibuild

Slashing build time from hours to minutes for more efficient game development lifecycles for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC Games

FromSoftware, a Tokyo-based game developer working on large multi-platform C++ projects for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC, faced very long build times—often tens of minutes to hours—on codebases exceeding millions of lines. To keep a unified development environment across platforms while shrinking build cycles, they turned to Incredibuild’s distributed-build platform and Visual Studio integration.

Incredibuild was integrated into FromSoftware’s workflow (including a custom Makefile/build‑event for PS3) to distribute compilation, shader builds, resource calculations and even intermediate linking across idle machines. The result: builds were shortened to roughly half to one‑tenth of their original time, became the studio standard, and produced dramatic examples such as Dark Souls II dropping from about 10.9 minutes to 2.9 minutes and Scholar of the First Sin from about 21.8 to 6.8 minutes after adopting Incredibuild.

FromSoftware