Tarsier Studios
Tarsier Studios is a game development company known for creating atmospheric games with a focus on immersive storytelling. Their signature title is the Little Nightmares series – a game beloved by millions of players around the world. The company makes games for most platforms, including Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation. With a team of around 70 individuals, Tarsier Studios continues to captivate and grow a fan base with its distinct approach to game development.
The challenge
Tarsier Studios had been seeing a decline in developer productivity for quite some time due to problems with their game development toolset. They were using Visual Studio, which tended to freeze while trying to index an extensive codebase of Unreal Engine projects. Visual Studio was also crashing for no reason despite the fact that their developers actually had what were considered pretty powerful machines back then!
Besides being sluggish, this setup wasn’t ideal for development with Unreal Engine, and it also came with a rather hefty price tag, too.
“Along with Visual Studio, we used Visual Assist, which was quite expensive. Honestly, I don’t think the setup did as good a job as JetBrains Rider does, but without Visual Assist, it would have been truly impossible to work with Unreal Engine because, natively, Visual Studio is just unable to do anything reasonable with the code base.”
— Tristan Louet, Lead Programmer at Tarsier Studios
These challenges prompted Tarsier Studios to seek alternative tools for their game development projects.
Solution criteria
While seeking an alternative solution for game development, Tarsier evaluated various criteria to ensure the chosen IDE would meet their specific needs and address the challenges they faced with Visual Studio. Some of the key evaluating criteria included:
- Performance: Tarsier sought a code editor capable of providing better performance, especially when handling the extensive codebase associated with Unreal Engine projects. An alternative code editor was aimed to offer smooth and efficient development.
- Stability and reliability: The team prioritized stability and reliability with the new tool to avoid the frequent crashes and disruptions they had been experiencing with Visual Studio.
- Compatibility with Unreal Engine: Given the studio’s focus on game development using Unreal Engine, they required a solution offering first-class support and engine-tailored features.
The solution
What started as an initiative of one of the developers spontaneously evolved into a team-wide usage in a couple of days. Finally, Tarsier Studios decided to adopt JetBrains Rider and use it as a primary development tool to avoid all the challenges associated with Visual Studio.
“There is really not much to say – we installed it, and it just worked out of the box. So, the switch to JetBrains Rider was a pretty smooth ride.”
— Tristan Louet, Lead Programmer at Tarsier Studios
The result
The implementation of Rider has had several positive effects on their game development workflows. The most notable of these are:
- Improved productivity: The problems with the code editor’s stability and response speed were resolved, allowing the team to avoid disruptions and focus entirely on the tasks at hand.
Reduced costs: As a solid code editor with all the necessary features that developers expected, JetBrains Rider enabled Tarsier to stop using Visual Studio and Visual Assist. As a result, tooling costs were reduced by 50%.
“I really enjoy working with Rider. I feel like it has such a good balance of being a full-featured IDE with all the tools you need, but compared to Visual Studio, it’s also performant and feels much less intrusive.”
— Tristan Louet, Lead Programmer at Tarsier Studios
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 Tarsier!