As we develop more assistive and automated game design systems, the question of how these systems should be integrated into game development workflows, and how much adaptation may be required, becomes increasingly important. In this paper we explore the impact of software engineering decisions on the ability of an automated game design system to understand a game's codebase, generate new game code, and evaluate its work. We argue that a new approach to software engineering may be required in order for game developers to fully benefit from automated game designers.
As the complexity and scope of game development increase, playtesting remains an essential activity to ensure the quality of video games. Yet, the manual, ad-hoc nature of playtesting gives space to improvements in the process. In this study, we investigate gaps between academic solutions in the literature for automated video game testing and the needs of video game developers in the industry. We performed a literature review on video game automated testing and applied an online survey with video game developers. The literature results show a rise in research topics related to automated video …
Computer games are very challenging to handle for traditional automated testing algorithms. In this paper we will look at intelligent agents as a solution. Agents are suitable for testing games, since they are reactive and able to reason about their environment to decide the action they want to take. This paper presents the experience of using an agent-based automated testing framework called \ivxr\ to test computer games. Three games will be discussed, including a sophisticated 3D game called Space Engineers. We will show how the framework can be used in different ways, either directly to dri…
We present World of Bugs (WOB), an open platform that aims to support Automated Bug Detection (ABD) research in video games. We discuss some open problems in ABD and how they relate to the platform's design, arguing that learning-based solutions are required if further progress is to be made. The platform's key feature is a growing collection of common video game bugs that may be used for training and evaluating ABD approaches.
Software game is a kind of application that is used not only for entertainment, but also for serious purposes that can be applicable to different domains such as education, business, and health care. Although the game development process differs from the traditional software development process because it involves interdisciplinary activities. Software engineering techniques are still important for game development because they can help the developer to achieve maintainability, flexibility, lower effort and cost, and better design. The purpose of this study is to assesses the state of the art …
The complexity of computer games is ever increasing. In this setup, guiding an automated test algorithm to find a solution to solve a testing task in a game's huge interaction space is very challenging. Having a model of a system to automatically generate test cases would have a strong impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of the algorithm. However, manually constructing a model turns out to be expensive and time-consuming. In this study, we propose an online agent-based search approach to solve common testing tasks when testing computer games that also constructs a model of the system on…
To enable automated software testing, the ability to automatically navigate to a state of interest and to explore all, or at least sufficient number of, instances of such a state is fundamental. When testing a computer game the problem has an extra dimension, namely the virtual world where the game is played on. This world often plays a dominant role in constraining which logical states are reachable, and how to reach them. So, any automated testing algorithm for computer games will inevitably need a layer that deals with navigation on a virtual world. Unlike e.g. navigating through the GUI of…
Modern AAA video games feature huge game levels and maps which are increasingly hard for level testers to cover exhaustively. As a result, games often ship with catastrophic bugs such as the player falling through the floor or being stuck in walls. We propose an approach specifically targeted at reachability bugs in simulated 3D environments based on the powerful exploration algorithm, Go-Explore, which saves unique checkpoints across the map and then identifies promising ones to explore from. We show that when coupled with simple heuristics derived from the game's navigation mesh, Go-Explore …
In the paper by D. Regulin et al. (IEEE Trans. On Automation Science and Engineering, vol. 13, no. 4, 1422-1432, October 2016) authors claim that they present a meta-model for the modeling of the Automated Material Flow Module (aMFM) and a model-driven design approach for aMFMs. In this letter we comment on the presented meta-model and the proposed model-driven approach regarding their potential for exploitation. We present specific arguments and make cases that call the authors design decision into question.
In the past 10 years, several researches studied video game development process who proposed approaches to improve the way how games are developed. These approaches usually adopt agile methodologies because of claims that traditional practices and the waterfall process are gone. However, are the "old days" really gone in the game industry? In this paper, we present a survey of software engineering processes in video game industry from postmortem project analyses. We analyzed 20 postmortems from Gamasutra Portal. We extracted their processes and modelled them through using the Business Process …
This article provides a personal perspective on research in Automated Quantum Software Engineering (AQSE). It elucidates the motivation to research AQSE (why?), a precise description of such a framework (what?), and reflections on components that are required for implementing it (how?).
Different from traditional software development, there is little information about the software-engineering process and techniques in video-game development. One popular way to share knowledge among the video-game developers' community is the publishing of postmortems, which are documents summarizing what happened during the video-game development project. However, these documents are written without formal structure and often providing disparate information. Through this paper, we provide developers and researchers with grounded dataset describing software-engineering problems in video-game d…
Automated Bug Detection (ABD) in video games is composed of two distinct but complementary problems: automated game exploration and bug identification. Automated game exploration has received much recent attention, spurred on by developments in fields such as reinforcement learning. The complementary problem of identifying the bugs present in a player's experience has for the most part relied on the manual specification of rules. Although it is widely recognised that many bugs of interest cannot be identified with such methods, little progress has been made in this direction. In this work we s…
Logs are semi-structured text generated by logging statements in software source code. In recent decades, software logs have become imperative in the reliability assurance mechanism of many software systems because they are often the only data available that record software runtime information. As modern software is evolving into a large scale, the volume of logs has increased rapidly. To enable effective and efficient usage of modern software logs in reliability engineering, a number of studies have been conducted on automated log analysis. This survey presents a detailed overview of automate…
Software Engineering is an engineering discipline but lacks a solid theoretical foundation. One effort in remedying this situation has been the SEMAT Essence specification. Essence consists of a language for modeling Software Engineering (SE) practices and methods and a kernel containing what its authors describe as being elements that are present in every software development project. In practice, it is a method agnostic project management tool for SE Projects. Using the language of the specification, Essence can be used to model any software development method or practice. Thus, the specific…
Usability engineering and usability testing are concepts that continue to evolve. Interesting research studies and new ideas come up every now and then. This paper tests the hypothesis of using an EDA based physiological measurements as a usability testing tool by considering three measures which are observers opinions, self reported data and EDA based physiological sensor data. These data were analyzed comparatively and statistically. It concludes by discussing the findings that has been obtained from those subjective and objective measures, which partially supports the hypothesis.
Retrieval-Augmented Instruction Tuning for Automated Process Engineering Calculations : A Tool-Chaining Problem-Solving Framework with Attributable Reflection
Project Management anti-patterns are well-documented in the software-engineering literature, and studying them allows understanding their impacts on teams and projects. The video game development industry is known for its mismanagement practices, and therefore applying this knowledge would help improving game developers' productivity and well-being. In this paper, we map project management anti-patterns to anti-patterns reported by game developers in the gray literature. We read 440 postmortems problems, identified anti-pattern candidates, and related them with definitions from the software-en…
Game development is an interdisciplinary concept that embraces artistic, software engineering, management, and business disciplines. This research facilitates a better understanding of important dimensions of digital game development methodology. Game development is considered as one of the most complex tasks in software engineering. The increased popularity of digital games, the challenges faced by game development organizations in developing quality games, and high competition in the digital game industry demand a game development maturity assessment. Consequently, this study presents a Digi…
Requirements Engineering (RE) is a means to reduce the risk of delivering a product that does not fulfill the stakeholders' needs. Therefore, a major challenge in RE is to decide how much RE is needed and what RE methods to apply. The quality of such decisions is strongly based on the RE expert's experience and expertise in carefully analyzing the context and current state of a project. Recent work, however, shows that lack of experience and qualification are common causes for problems in RE. We trained a series of Bayesian Networks on data from the NaPiRE survey to model relationships between…
Fuxi AI Lab in Netease（网易伏羲AI实验室）；University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）
Graphically-rich applications such as games are ubiquitous with attractive visual effects of Graphical User Interface (GUI) that offers a bridge between software applications and end-users. However, various types of graphical glitches may arise from such GUI complexity and have become one of the main component of software compatibility issues. Our study on bug reports from game development teams in NetEase Inc. indicates that graphical glitches frequently occur during the GUI rendering and severely degrade the quality of graphically-rich applications such as video games. Existing automated tes…
In this paper, we propose the use of interactive theorem proving for explainable machine learning. After presenting our proposition, we illustrate it on the dedicated application of explaining security attacks using the Isabelle Infrastructure framework and its process of dependability engineering. This formal framework and process provides the logics for specification and modeling. Attacks on security of the system are explained by specification and proofs in the Isabelle Infrastructure framework. Existing case studies of dependability engineering in Isabelle are used as feasibility studies t…
Developing modern systems software is a complex task that combines business logic programming and Software Performance Engineering (SPE). The later is an experimental and labor-intensive activity focused on optimizing the system for a given hardware, software, and workload (hw/sw/wl) context. Today's SPE is performed during build/release phases by specialized teams, and cursed by: 1) lack of standardized and automated tools, 2) significant repeated work as hw/sw/wl context changes, 3) fragility induced by a "one-size-fit-all" tuning (where improvements on one workload or component may impact o…
