Why I Built ButterStack: Bringing Software Clarity to Game Development

Hey 👋, I’m Ryan.

I’ve spent about twenty years building software, from enterprise applications at large companies, to startups to developer tools at Perforce. But it was my time working with game studios that showed me a problem nobody was solving.

The Question That Kept Coming Up

When I worked as a Solutions Engineer at Perforce, I talked to game studios every day. Big AAA teams, scrappy indie developers, and everyone in between. And they all asked me the same question in different ways:

“How do I get visibility into my pipeline?”

“How do I know who changed what and why?”

“Who broke the build? (Again FNG?!)”

“How do I actually build a game…?”

That last one surprised me at first. These were talented developers and artists building incredible games. But when it came to the infrastructure, the pipelines, the builds, the asset tracking, they were constantly reinventing the wheel.

The Gap I Couldn’t Ignore

Here’s what I noticed: AAA studios with hundreds of developers had internal tools teams. These teams built custom dashboards, tracking systems, and observability platforms that gave leadership a complete view of their development pipeline. I saw one of these systems on a call with one of the largest AAA studios that rhymes with __ (😉). It was an amazing, massive matrix showing Xbox, PS4, PS5, Switch, PC builds across dev, staging, QA, and production environments. Build statuses, test results, deployments, all in one view. And the most interesting part, I saw it again a few months later at another (and competing) AAA studio.

It was like having a ‘goldeneye’ view into the entire game development operation.

But smaller studios? Indies? AA teams with 10-50 people? They were duct-taping together Jenkins, Git/Google Drive/Dropbox, Jira, Discord, and spreadsheets. Every new project meant figuring out the same problems from scratch. How do I hook up Jenkins to Unreal? What are the pros and cons of Git LFS versus Perforce? How do I track asset approvals?

I looked for a solution I could recommend. Something like Datadog or Sentry, Grafana or NewRelic, tools that had transformed software observability, but for game development.

It didn’t exist.

Software Development Figured This Out

I come from traditional-ish software development background. We have established patterns. We have observability platforms. We have conventions.

Ruby on Rails revolutionized web development not because it invented anything new per se, but because it gave developers rails to follow. Convention over configuration. DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). Put your files here, structure your code this way, and you can focus on building your product (or game) instead of debating folder structures or white-space (been there, done that 😅).

SaaS software development has been figured out. There are blogs, books, and established best practices. When you start a new software project, you don’t have to invent your CI/CD pipeline from scratch.

But game development? Every studio reinvents the wheel. Every project starts with the same debates about tooling and process. The creative people, the artists, the indies, the designers, the people who actually make games fun, get bogged down in infrastructure problems that software teams solved years ago.

Bridging Two Worlds

Game developers understand game development. They know art pipelines, they know asset workflows, they know what makes a game ship.

I understand software development lifecycles. Build systems, CI/CD, DevOps, observability, process automation, the boring infrastructure stuff that makes teams move faster.

The merging of those two worlds is where ButterStack lives.

I’m not trying to tell game developers how to make games. I’m trying to give late-night hackers, technical directors, art students, CTO/CEOs and others the same visibility into game development that software teams take for granted. Who is doing what? How are assets moving through the pipeline? What’s the team’s velocity? Where are the bottlenecks?

What ButterStack Actually Does

ButterStack connects to the tools game teams already use, like Perforce, Jenkins, Jira, GitHub, and Discord, and provides a unified observability layer on top.

We’re not replacing your tools. We’re not telling you how to structure your project. We’re just giving you visibility that you’ve never had before. As we learn new and more efficient ways, we’ll bring you along as well.

Think of it as the “Rails” for game development pipelines, both figuratively (guidance and best practices) and literally (built on Ruby on Rails with that same philosophy of convention over configuration).

The Mission

My goal is simple: make it easier to build games by solving the infrastructure problems that have already been solved in software development.

Small studios shouldn’t have to build internal tooling to get the same visibility as AAA teams. Technical leaders shouldn’t have to dig through five different systems to understand what’s breaking in their pipeline. Publishers and investors shouldn’t have to guess whether a project is on track.

If you’ve ever asked “who changed that file?” or “why did the build break?” or “where is this asset in the approval process?” then ButterStack is built for you.

Let’s Connect

I love talking about game development pipelines, whether you’re using ButterStack or not. If you’re wrestling with build systems, asset tracking, or pipeline visibility, I’d genuinely like to hear about it.

Thanks!
Ryan L’Italien
Founder and CEO of ButterStack

Want to see what pipeline observability looks like? Try ButterStack free and connect your first integration in minutes.

Or just email me at: ryan@butterstack.com.