Case Study: Undead Labs achieves dramatic build-speed gains — cutting lighting precompute from 1 hour to 10 minutes and full builds to 7 minutes with Incredibuild

Undead Labs turns lumbering 1 hour lighting build times into 10 minute sprints

Undead Labs, the AAA studio behind State of Decay and its sequel, faced slow iteration times from heavy compute tasks—long C++ builds, shader compilations, lighting pre-computes and a busy CI system producing hundreds of daily builds across Xbox One and PC. To meet fan expectations and speed development for its 55-person team, Undead Labs needed a way to drastically reduce build and precompute bottlenecks. They turned to Incredibuild and its Dev Tools solution to accelerate these workflows.

Incredibuild deployed agents on three 12-core build servers and ~45 developer machines (4-core), allowing workstations to scale up to 216 cores. The results were dramatic: full C++ builds fell from ~45 minutes to ~7 minutes, incremental builds dropped 25–50% on average, shader compilation went from ~3 minutes to ~0.25 minutes (~15 seconds), and lighting pre-compute passes shrank from ~60 minutes to ~10 minutes. Incredibuild’s acceleration also improved CI turnaround and iteration speed, giving Undead Labs faster testing cycles and measurable productivity gains.

Undead Labs

Ted Woolsey

General Manager