Hidden away in The Stupendium studio is a small computer with a very important job. Their name is Stubie, which is short for Stupendibuild. They rarely complain, demands no annual leave, and has only occasionally been murdered by someone accidentally unplugging them.
When we first founded the studio, one of my first desires was to automate our game build pipelines as quickly as possible – there were several reasons for this:
- Save the team from building and uploading games manually.
- Keep new builds consistent and reliable.
- Catch broken commits and cook errors early.
- Make the latest builds easy for anyone to access.
- Remove technical barriers for playtesters and collaborators.
- Keep stable and experimental builds neatly separated.
- Reduce repetitive work and avoid human error.
- Let the team spend more time making the game.
This led me to asking Amber, our backend engineer, to construct us a little PC that could handle this for us. So last year we had a day in the studio where Jen and I spent a few hours recording sound effects whilst Amber built and setup a special little child who had not yet been named.
On 25 September 2025, Stubie was activated for the very first time. That same day, they successfully created their first automatic build and uploaded it to Steam, ready for the team to download, play and test.
A few days later at our regular sprintly show-and-tell, we discussed naming our build machine to give them a little bit of personality – we landed on “Stupendibuild” that was very quickly shortened to “Stubie” which everyone very quickly fell in love with.
So what does Stubie-dooby-do exactly? Well, Stubie runs the automated software that builds and packages our games every time someone changes something and pushes it to our version control hosted on Github. This how it works:
Stupengineer commits changes → GitHub receives them → GitHub Actions wakes Stubie up → Stubie downloads the latest project → Stubie builds and packages the game → Stubie uploads it to Steam.
We use Steam as our main way of sharing the game with the team and distributing builds for playtests. It is an incredibly useful platform for getting the latest version onto people’s computers quickly and without much technical fuss.
We use several private beta branches for different purposes. Our alpha branch contains the most stable build, while latest contains the newest work added to the project. Because Steam handles downloading and updating everything automatically, almost anyone can access the game regardless of their technical experience, which makes organising playtests considerably easier.
Stubie also pre-builds every new commit made to our projects, giving us an early warning if a change causes a cook error or breaks the build. This lets our Stupengineers sanity-check their work before it reaches the main branch, catching major problems early and keeping stress levels across the team a little lower.
Every hour Stubie spends building and checking our commits is an hour one of us can spend designing, creating art or coding something cool instead, which is a much better use of everyone’s time.
Stubie may only be a little box full of wires with some googly eyes, but they’re a vital part of our plans to build a strong and sustainable studio. Stubie is not only building today’s game. They are part of the infrastructure that will help make every future Softworks game possible.
Stubie may one day be joined by a few more build machines, but for now our little child does everything we could possibly need. They are not the only machine at The Stupendium, though. Stubie’s brother Armando, our Cinebot Mini robot arm, is often nearby watching over him while he whirrs away cooking games.
So say hello, and a big thank you, to Stubie: the little build machine that could. They keep our games building, our projects running smoothly and our Stupengineers a little less stressed.
