August 18 2022

"Pipeliness" Studios


I still see this happen.

“Pipeliness” studios many times I do consulting. In spite of having no pipelines of any kind, they still produce great games, engaging experiences, profitable apps. Only that they ship projects at a much higher cost than they should.

No build pipelines, no performance monitoring pipelines, no asset import pipelines, nothing at all. Like, not even a sad Unity cloud build setup (which would be way better than nothing).

Picture this. You submit your 3d artwork after a week of pouring sweating. But you can’t validate the result of it in the real world because you must wait for a build. Of course, the developer owning builds is in sick leave. And you don’t know when they’ll be back.

Will your work be good enough in the final build? You don’t know. So you feel unease about it for days.

Can you imagine that?

I can. In fact, I see this happen, like this very week.

Artists and designers losing time because there is no automated build pipelines that simply gives them a link to validate the result of their hard work. And so employees are forced to wait, possibly even do the laundry and dishes along the way.

If only they had a build pipeline…

It turns out it isn’t that hard. For a starter, you can just use Unity Cloud Build. It isn’t great, but it will get the job done. This specific tech makes you lose flexibility, extensibility and sacrifice build times, but it’s still a net positive.

Later down the road you can move to a setup that truly kills the downtime of your team. I have brought studios quite some development speed gains with technologies like jenkins and bitrise cli.

If your studio could profit from automating processes, let’s talk. I can help.

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