Wasteland 3

Partner studio: Puny Human

Concept

A squad-based post-apocalyptic RPG set in frozen Colorado, with a branching reactive narrative, synchronous and asynchronous multiplayer and a two-player co-op campaign. Crowdfunded at over $3M, then completed after the developer's acquisition by Microsoft.

Requirement

The title had to ship simultaneously on Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with macOS and Linux builds to follow, and had to meet first-party delivery and compliance requirements as an Xbox Game Studios day-one Game Pass release. That put continuous, reliable, multi-platform builds squarely on the critical path — a build system capable of producing certifiable packages for five targets without becoming a bottleneck for a large content team.

Approach

A build engineering and DevOps practice developed and extended the CI/CD platform underpinning the project, on Unreal tooling with Perforce and Jenkins, and ran the cloud infrastructure behind it.

Producers were supported directly in prioritizing optimization issues and clearing blockers, with code and asset pipelines analyzed to improve build stability. A concept art and ideation workstream ran alongside the technical work.

Delivery scope

• Build engineering
• CI/CD platform development
• DevOps
• Cloud engineering
• Multi-platform build and packaging (Windows, PS4, Xbox One, macOS, Linux)
• Build stability and pipeline analysis
• Release support
• Concept art and ideation

Results

• Shipped 28 August 2020 on Windows, PS4 and Xbox One; macOS and Linux followed 17 December 2020
• Metacritic 85; over 2 million players by December 2021
• Two DLC releases supported on the same pipeline through 2021
• 30–50 person-months delivered, across 2–3 engineers over roughly two years
• Delivered inside a continuous January 2017 – December 2019 build engineering engagement covering three concurrent client titles

Engine: Unity.