The Believer Company today released its in-house developed tool, Friendshipper, as an open source project.
The studio was founded by Riot Games veterans and is currently working on a next-gen open-world multiplayer game. Friendshipper is a development tool the team is using to improve the efficiency of building the game, including faster implementation of bug fixes during playtesting.
Chief Technology Officer Landon McDowell said: Gaming Industry The goal of Friendshipper is to “make code changes very quickly, build them very quickly, and communicate those build changes to ourselves and our testers.”
As for why the studio is sharing the technology with other developers, McDowell says it's down to one simple belief: “There's just a better way to make video games.”
“We haven't had the best experiences in our careers, and one of the reasons we came here is because we wanted to invest and for a variety of reasons we wanted to find a better way,” he explains.
“We'd like to be able to playtest more frequently. We want to be able to avoid, wherever possible, some of the more difficult and problematic aspects of game development. And we think that's an essential part of the game development process.”
Since its founding last year, The Believer Company has grown to 65 people, of which McDowell says only three (“about three” to be exact) are dedicated to developing Friendshipper (though the CTO points out that other members of the team also collaborate on the project from time to time).
To that end, he emphasizes that Friendshipper as it stands today is just one potential solution to some of the problems facing game developers.
“We're not arrogant enough to think we have all the answers,” he says. “We have ideas about things we want to do differently and improve, but there's an entire industry of game developers out there who have similar experiences and have different ideas about how to make it happen.”
“The best we can do is try and put out what we think are great development tools that solve every problem in game development. But we want to share that quickly and start building a community around these tools and ideas so that we can learn and grow from the experiences of other people in the industry.”
He added that Friendshipper is also designed to make development easier, because “making games should be fun.”
“We believe that if developers have a great experience in game development, players benefit too,” he says, “so we want to share these tools and practices and build a community around them, because we believe that if the industry adopts these development methodologies and practices, players as a whole benefit.”
Our conversation with McDowell also touched on other ways developers can make games faster, better and cheaper. GamesIndustry.biz will be covering this in more detail in our GI Sprint editorial feature later this month. Stay tuned for our conversation with McDowell at GI Sprint.
We previously interviewed The Believer Company's CEO Michael Chou and Chief Product Officer Steven Snow shortly after the new studio secured $55 million in seed funding. You can read more about the studio's origins and ambitions in the full interview.
