Introduction

At Space Ape we have a lot of shared code which we use across all of our projects. As of now, we have 57 shared code modules; these range from messaging systems, logging and our in-game console, to crowd rendering and asset processing, .

Why Share Code?

• We don’t need to spend time reinventing the wheel.
• We have the flexibility to take the shared modules we require.
• We’re confident that this code comes with a suite of unit and integration tests.
• We know it’s been proven in practical use across previous projects.
• We are all familiar with the code, making project start-up times much faster.

Sharing code allows developers to focus more on the final product, in our case the games we create, because they spend less time worrying about low-level implementation details and non functional requirements.

The Journey

All of this shared code didn’t just happen overnight. We’ve tried and failed quite a few times with our release process, distribution and collaboration. As a result of failing and learning from these failures, we’re now able to easily share our code, and developers from various projects are all contributing to it.

The process is by no means perfect – we’re still working out the kinks – but it’s improved our workflow a lot, and maybe it will work for you too.

At the Beginning, there was only Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V

When Space Ape first started we were all focused on one project, so there was no need to share code. We were a start-up and our primary objective was to ship a product.

When the time came to start our second project, some of the code was copied over from the first project and we remove any project dependencies, but we had a code base to start with. Our first title was still being developed, bugs were being fixed, and features were being added.

Whilst all of this was happening the two code bases diverged quite a bit. If a bug was fixed in one of our games, there’s a good chance that fix didn’t make it into the other game – the same goes for features and improvements. As each project went on, the ‘shared’ code was modified to fit each project, and in the end sharing code between projects was more hassle than it’s worth.

Context of the Problem

Roll forward a few years. We now have a few established games, Samurai Siege, Rival Kingdoms, Transformers: Earth Wars and Fastlane, and we’ve entered into a partnership with Supercell.

Unsurprisingly, our company goals have changed a bit. We’re no longer a start-up in the true sense of the phrase. Our goal is to create a genre defining mobile hit, and in doing so we are moving away from our build and battle heritage.

We are branching out into many new genres, so we need to iterate quickly. We can’t predict that every new game idea will be a success. We need to try new things rapidly, and learn as quickly as possible.

Having a solid foundation of shared code would help us to iterate faster. In order to do this we would have to look at how we could share code between projects, with as little pain and slowdown as possible. When it comes to sharing code, the biggest obstacle is not writing the code itself, it’s the tooling and practices around releasing and distributing it.

Enter Git Submodules

Git Submodules are like a repository within a repository. You can continue to work on your code base and once you’ve finished a feature or fixed a bug, you can check it in. You just push your shared code up to one repository, and your project’s code to another.

This seemed ideal at first! We were already using Git across our studio so everyone was familiar with it. But we soon ran into problems.

As the source code is there for you to edit freely, teams would obviously change shared code, check it in and then when the other team pulled changes, their code wouldn’t compile! This sounds a little lazy and reckless, but this issue stems from the fact that there is no boundary between what is shared code and what isn’t. From a team’s point-of-view, they are just changing code in one big solution. The ideal solution here is to expose a simple yet well-defined API to the game teams.

So once this became an issue, each team decided to branch the shared modules off the master branch, and we were back to square one. Two diverging code paths, never merged together.

Further to this, we found that anyone who’s not a developer (artists, animators etc) can have quite a hard time using submodules. The tooling around submodules isn’t straight forward. Often we would update a submodule but someone wouldn’t pull changes for that submodule, so project and shared code would get out of sync.

Maven

Our server developers use Maven to manage and release packages. Maven is a tool developed for the Java ecosystem. When you are ready to release your project, Maven will take all of the information within a pom file and then package up your code so that it can be shared with others.

Because of all the features offered by Maven, and the fact that it’s not a native .Net tool chain, it often felt more complicated than it needed to be. Out of the box it comes with things like build life-cycle management. But at the end of the day all we were really interested in was dependency management, versioning and packaging; and that came with a lot of overhead. We ended up creating custom build steps to install our packages which made our build and release process even more complicated. As it wasn’t natively supported (or developed for) either Unity or .Net we felt that there must be a better solution.

Unity Packages

Because we are using Unity, the next technology that came to mind was Unity Packages, just like you see on the Asset Store. It was really easy to integrate. However, the whole release process and package storage was quite unregulated. There’s no real package versioning support and no dependency management. You also need additional tooling to uninstall a package as there’s no defined package structure, so we would have to clean up the old package before installing the new one.

Finally, Unity packages traditionally contained source code. We wanted to stop teams making changes to source code within these shared modules and improve compile times. This meant we needed to use Dynamic Link Libraries. DLL’s also allow us to easily develop shared code modules that depend on other modules, without having to make sure that the source code for the dependency was the correct version and compiled in the first place. Whats more using DLL’s would also lead us to faster compile times.

So we looked elsewhere, and found:

NuGet

If you’ve not come across Nuget before, it’s a package management system designed specifically for the .Net framework and it supports dependency management. There are currently over 110,000 packages on the public repository, some of which we were already using. However this repository is public, and a lot of our code isn’t for public release, so we couldn’t just go ahead and push our packages up to this public repository.

Before we could make a start there was quite a bit of work involved in setting up a whole development and release process around Nuget, not to mention setting up our own Nuget package server and getting everything to work nicely with Unity. In my next blog post I’m going to take you through everything, from start to finish.