Striking Distance Studios (SDS) released their first game The Callisto Protocol in December 2022. Published by KRAFTON, this all-new story-driven survival horror game is set in the year 2320 and challenges its players to take on the role of Jacob Lee, an inmate of the horrific Black Iron Prison – a maximum-security penitentiary located on Jupiter’s dead moon, Callisto.
SDS is led by Dead Space and Call of Duty franchise veteran Glen Schofield. The team at SDS has a passion for their craft. In their own words, “we are driven to do what we do, and hold ourselves to high standards, challenging ourselves to push further in a pursuit of excellence.”
Developing any game is an epic task, but developing your first game as a studio, with such high expectations, is a daunting challenge. With a large distributed team and numerous external partners, modern development poses a number of challenges:
The challenge quickly becomes one of logistics: distributing terabytes of builds, collecting huge volumes of crash and performance data across the entire team, while still being able to view and organize this all in one convenient place.
“Building a game releasing across five platforms with hundreds of changes made every day quickly becomes a huge logistics problem in managing data. AccelByte’s Development Toolkit enabled Striking Distance Studios to quickly analyze output from build systems alongside autotest and crash data in a single web accessible portal.” - Mark James, CTO of Striking Distance Studios
Striking Distance Studios is using AccelByte Development Toolkit (ADT) to help solve these challenges.
Towards the end of development, builds of The Callisto Protocol reached upwards of 80 GB, with dozens of builds across numerous platforms being created every day. SDS wanted to be able to create a build for each Perforce changelist that was committed so that they could perform QA and automated tests on them, as well as making those builds available for other stakeholders. In order to do this they needed to be able to push builds to their entire distributed team and external partners quickly and efficiently.
Getting builds to their destination is one thing, but SDS wanted more than this–they wanted to be able to have builds automatically download and install to connected dev kits so that developers could arrive in the morning knowing that they had the latest build installed and ready to go.
SDS also wanted to be able to organize their builds by platform and configuration so that they could maintain multiple builds for each platform simultaneously. They also needed to be able to control who had access to specific builds so they could share them safely.
ADT helped SDS do this by:
With a game of the size and complexity of The Callistico Protocol, SDS needed to be able to ensure that the game was continually hitting quality and performance metrics. To do this they wanted a platform that could collect builds, sessions, crashes, logs, and performance metrics in one place, in order to build a comprehensive view of the health of The Callisto Protocol at all times.
ADT helped SDS do this by:
ADT helped Striking Distance Studios successfully maintain game quality and health all the way from the development phase until launch. The results?
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