Nippon Ichi

About Nippon Ichi Software

Incredibuild helped Nippon Ichi Software port its famous Disgaea series, which exceeded three million sales worldwide, from PlayStation to the Nintendo Switch as a launch title. We asked Yusaku Nagayasu, a programmer at Nippon Ichi Software, how Incredibuild enabled the studio to release the game in time.

The Challenge

“Comparing the development of Nintendo Switch with that of PlayStation – they were differences in resolution and hardware memory spec, yet the most challenging issue was the building time. When porting for Nintendo Switch, we needed to emulate it on Windows because we lacked the production model. Although we provided high-performance machines to our main developers, one full build took over 22 minutes.

As the series progressed, the dependencies of source code have become more complicated. By resolving this issue one could expect we cut down on the build time, but due to cost and time problems, and considering we were dealing with porting a title and development time was short, it was not realistic.”

How Incredibuild Crunched it

“First, we tried to use the FreeDev version of Incredibuild and we were able to cut our build time to 7:20 min. It is a one-third of the original build time. When we tried it on five computers, which is the maximum of the FreeDev version, the build time was cut down to 4:50 min.

Therefore, we decided to purchase six licenses of Incredibuild for our 6 developers for ‘Disgaea 5 ported Project’ in expectation of cutting down build time.

As a result, we could proceed the development towards launching the game smoothly.

Incredibuild also helped us in other projects. Project A, like “Disgaea 5” is a title for Nintendo Switch. A process that took 5:50 min without distribution turned into 1:15 with Incredibuild distribution.

In each project, we managed to cut the build time by using Incredibuild, especially in the case of Nintendo Switch.”

In the end, Incredibuild’s innate ability to compile to multiple platforms at the same time proved to be a game-changer for Nippon Ichi and their multiplatform titles.

As Nagayasu-san tells us, “We are planning to deploy Incredibuild to different platforms. Since the bigger the project is, the more effective Incredibuild gets, we intend to utilize it in the future. Also, as we begin to build with a Continuous integration system, we believe in the abilities of Incredibuild, which stably works on multiple platforms.”