Life Beyond Studios

How Life Beyond Studios reduced UE5 builds to 6 minutes and empowered feature branch with Build Cache

About Life Beyond Studios

Life Beyond Studios (formally Darewise), a subsidiary of Animoca Brands, is a game studio founded by veterans of the AAA games industry that is currently developing the play-and-earn sci-fi MMO Life Beyond. The core team includes Benjamin Charbit (game director Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag), Marc Albinet (game director of Assassin’s Creed Unity and Dying Light 2), Christian Bravery (art director of Black & White and the Fable series), and Samuel Kahn (tech lead for Ubisoft’s Snowdrop Engine and Crytek’s Cryengine).

The Challenge 

Life Beyond Studios follows a product-driven approach of open development that means a constant evolution of the Life Beyond game. Since the beginning of June 2019, the game has been in active development with several shipped prototypes and regular releases. While this iterative process fosters innovation, transparency, and community engagement, it involves working with different technological stacks and integrations – Web3, decentralization, Tokenomics, NFTs – in building a successful AAA game. With an expansive team of 100 people remotely located across major cities like London, Paris, and Barcelona. Life Beyond Studios was faced with the challenge of maintaining optimal iteration frequency with the added technical complexity of remote workforce.

“We want to create a culture of fast iteration and continuous deployment, the speed of builds is critical to the viability of those development processes and enables us to have a unique culture where we are comfortable delivering builds very regularly without the need for branching, locking, too much stabilization or debugging, or any more complex process that would slow us down. Therefore, incredibuild is key.”
Samuel Khan
CTO and Co-Founder

How Incredibuild Helped 

The studio compared Incredibuild with other solutions and decided on Incredibuild because of the superior outcome. Using Incredibuild’s distribution technology both in developer environments and CI nodes they were able to reduce UE5 code and shader compilations from two hours to 22 minutes. But LBS wanted to go even faster. Using Incredibuild’s Build Cache technology they were able to achieve further acceleration, reducing total time to 6 minutes. Moreover, Build Cache helped remote employees improve productivity despite having low bandwidth and adopt feature branch best practices

“Using Incredibuild’s Build Cache technology, in addition to its distribution technology, not only reduced our build times even further, but it also allowed us to work smarter with feature branches, even when working remotely with low bandwidth. We look forward to getting even more acceleration by deploying link and centralized shared caching in the future.”
Pawel Karczmarczuk
Principal Tools & Tech Programmer

The bottom line 

Beyond Life Studios was able to speed up their project from 2 hours to 6 minutes by adding Build Cache to their distribution.

Learn more in our interview with CTO and Co-founder at Life Beyond Studios, Samuel Khan

Builds with Incredibuild Distribution
2 hours
22 minutes
Builds with Build Cache
2 hours
6 minutes
Industry

Process

Results