Context: Given its competitiveness, the video-game industry has a closed-source culture. Hence, little is known of the problems faced by game developers. However, game developers do share information about their games projects through postmortems, which describe informally what happened during the projects. Objective: The software-engineering research community and game developers would benefit from a state of the problems of the video game industry, in particular the problems faced by game developers, their evolution in time, and their root causes. This state of the practice would allow researchers and practitioners to work towards solving these problems. Method: We analyzed 200 postmortems from 1997 to 2019, resulting in 927 problems divided into 20 types. Through our analysis, we described the overall landscape of game industry problems in the past 23 years and how these problems evolved over the years. We also give details on the most common problems, their root causes, and possible solutions. We finally discuss suggestions for future projects. Results: We observe that (1) the game industry suffers from management and production problems in the same proportion; (2) management problems decreased over the years giving space to business problems, while production problems remained constant; (3a) technical and game design problems are decreasing over the years, the latter only after the last decade; (3b) problems related to the team increase over the last decade;(3c) marketing problems are the ones that had the biggest increase over the 23 years compared to other problem types; (4) finally, the majority of the main root causes are related to people, not technologies. Conclusions: In this paper we provide a state of the practice for researchers to understand and study video-game development problems. We also offer suggestions to help practitioners to avoid the most common problems.
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 …
Awareness of cybersecurity topics, e.g., related to secure coding guidelines, enables software developers to write secure code. This awareness is vital in industrial environments for the products and services in critical infrastructures. In this work, we introduce and discuss a new serious game designed for software developers in the industry. This game addresses software developers' needs and is shown to be well suited for raising secure coding awareness of software developers in the industry. Our work results from the experience of the authors gained in conducting more than ten CyberSecurity…
Teaching industry staff on cybersecurity issues is a fundamental activity that must be undertaken in order to guarantee the delivery of successful and robust products to market. Much research attention has been devoted to this topic over the last years. However, the research which has been done has not focused on developing secure code in industrial environments. In this paper we take a look at the constraints and requirements for delivering a training, by means of cybersecurity challenges, that covers secure coding topics from an industry perspective. Using requirements engineering, we aim at…
Video-game projects are notorious for having day-one bugs, no matter how big their budget or team size. The quality of a game is essential for its success. This quality could be assessed and ensured through testing. However, to the best of our knowledge, little is known about video-game testing. In this paper, we want to understand how game developers perform game testing. We investigate, through a survey, the academic and gray literature to identify and report on existing testing processes and how they could automate them. We found that game developers rely, almost exclusively, upon manual pl…
Context: The video game industry is a billion dollar industry that faces problems in the way games are developed. One method to address these problems is using developer aid tools, such as Recommendation Systems. These tools assist developers by generating recommendations to help them perform their tasks. Objective: This article describes a systematic approach to recommend development processes for video game projects, using postmortem knowledge extraction and a model of the context of the new project, in which "postmortems" are articles written by video game developers at the end of projects,…
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…
Gamification is the use of game elements such as points, leaderboards, and badges in a non-game context to encourage a desired behavior from individuals interacting with an environment. Recently, gamification has found its way into software engineering contexts as a means to promote certain activities to practitioners. Previous studies investigated the use of gamification to promote the adoption of a variety of tools and practices, however, these studies were either performed in an educational environment or in small to medium-sized teams of developers in the industry. We performed a large-sca…
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 …
Many industrial IT security standards and policies mandate the usage of a secure coding methodology in the software development process. This implies two different aspects: first, secure coding must be based on a set of secure coding guidelines, and second software developers must be aware of these secure coding practices. On the one side, secure coding guidelines seems a bit like a black-art: while there exist abstract guidelines that are widely accepted, low-level secure coding guidelines for different programming languages are scarce. On the other side, once a set of secure coding guideline…
Context. The game industry is increasingly growing in recent years. Every day, millions of people play video games, not only as a hobby, but also for professional competitions (e.g., e-sports or speed-running) or for making business by entertaining others (e.g., streamers). The latter daily produce a large amount of gameplay videos in which they also comment live what they experience. Since no software and, thus, no video game is perfect, streamers may encounter several problems (such as bugs, glitches, or performance issues). However, it is unlikely that they explicitly report such issues to …
According to a recent survey with more than 4000 software developers, less than half of developers can spot security holes. As a result, software products present a low-security quality expressed by vulnerabilities that can be exploited by cyber-criminals. This lack of quality and security is particularly dangerous if the software which contains the vulnerabilities is deployed in critical infrastructures. Serious games, and in particular, Capture-the-Flag(CTF) events, have shown promising results in improving secure coding awareness of software developers in the industry. The challenges in the…
VDEH-Betriebsforschungsinstitut（VDEH运营研究所）；thyssenkrupp Rasselstein GmbH（蒂森克虏伯拉斯泰因有限公司）；Scuola Superiore di Studi Universitari e di Perfezionamento Sant'Anna（圣安娜高等研究大学）；CETIC - Centre d'Excellence en Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication（CETIC - 信息与通信技术卓越中心）；Sidenor I+D（西登诺研发中心）
Progressive digitalization is changing the game of many industrial sectors. Focus-ing on product quality the main profitability driver of this so-called Industry 4.0 will be the horizontal integration of information over the complete supply chain. Therefore, the European RFCS project 'Quality4.0' aims in developing an adap-tive platform, which releases decisions on product quality and provides tailored information of high reliability that can be individually exchanged with customers. In this context Machine Learning will be used to detect outliers in the quality data. This paper discusses the …
