About

Industry: Game development

JetBrains products used: Rider

Organization Size: 145

Country: United States

seconddinner.com

Second Dinner

Second Dinner is an independent game development studio founded by industry veterans from Blizzard Entertainment. The company is best known for creating Marvel Snap, a fast-paced digital card game that quickly gained popularity for its strategic depth and innovative gameplay mechanics. Second Dinner aims to craft games that are both fun and approachable while maintaining a high level of polish and creativity.

The challenge

As the studio’s game evolved and expanded to new platforms, the company found itself dealing with a diverse range of technologies and code editors being used by team members. It became challenging to maintain consistent coding standards and practices across the team.

Besides that, their then-used code editor tended to freeze while trying to handle a massive codebase. If a development tool is slow by itself, it becomes quite difficult to code, not to mention the overall drop in productivity faced by the team as a result.

These challenges prompted Second Dinner to seek an alternative solution for game development that would streamline its workflows and improve efficiency.

Solution criteria

The company had various criteria to evaluate whether a solution covered their needs and addressed the challenges they faced. Here are just a few of these criteria:

  1. Cross-platform – Most of the company’s development happened on macOS, but sometimes, switching back to Windows was necessary. A new code editor was needed to provide a seamless development experience across operating systems.
  2. Performance – The team was looking for a code editor capable of handling an extensive codebase without lags or resource drains, at least in core features.

    3. “I think performance probably has the most impact on my work day to day: fast code search, fast IntelliSense, fast helpers, code recommendations, and refactorings – those are just tools I use every day, and that’s what I expect from an IDE.”

    — Kevin Le, Principal Software Engineer at Second Dinner

  3. Compatibility with Unity – Since Marvel Snap is powered by Unity, the studio required a solution offering top-notch integration and support for engine-specific features.

  4. Support for web technologies – A critical part of the game processing all of the in-game purchases was written in ASP.NET.

The solution

After considering various options, Second Dinner decided to switch to JetBrains Rider. The transition went quite smoothly and didn’t take much time:

“Initial setup was pretty minor. It was just like setting up our code formatting options and making sure that those were disseminated to the whole team.”

— Matthew Brand, Senior Software Engineer at Second Dinner

The company also considered Visual Studio Code over Rider as the primary tool for game development, but found it lacked features to cover developers’ needs, even with all of the plugins available.

The result

The adoption of Rider had positive effects. The most notable of these are:

  1. Improved productivity – The studio reduced inconsistency in their development tools, which streamlined development processes. Combined with Rider’s speed, this resulted in increased development efficiency.

    2. “I think, my overall experience has been really good, from someone who came from Visual Studio and now uses Rider long-term. And if there’s one reason for anyone to switch to Rider, it would be performance – when you’re coding, performance makes a really big impact.”

    — Kevin Le, Principal Software Engineer at Second Dinner

  2. Enhanced testing – This was an unexpected bonus. The studio has historically written quite a few unit tests for its games, but now it’s being handled by AI. It turned out that JetBrains AI is good at both authoring unit tests and generating data for them. Together with its thoughtful interface and Rider’s speed, the testing experience was taken to another level.

Overall, Rider has become beloved by the game and backend development teams as well as by the tech artists. It is now the de facto standard code editor for the majority of those at Second Dinner.

A way forward

For those looking to elevate their game development experience, taking a step toward JetBrains Rider could be a game changer. Try it now and see if it can work as well for your business as it has for Second Dinner!

Download Rider