从软件工程视角刻画开源视频游戏

中文摘要 AI 辅助

视频游戏在娱乐产业中占据突出地位，构成了一个价值数十亿美元的全球市场。在这一生态系统中，独立工作室、小团队和独立开发者以有限的预算运营，同时通过诸如 this http URL 等平台发布其游戏，其中许多项目也以开源形式提供。即使项目已完全发布，其他开发者仍可通过源代码访问开发过程，从而帮助其他开发者开发自己的游戏。这些开源游戏也为实证软件工程研究构成了宝贵的语料库，提供了对商业项目中通常无法获取的开发工件的透明访问。本研究从软件工程的角度刻画开源视频游戏，重点关注其类型、受欢迎程度、仓库活动、实现特征和测试实践。为此，我们从 this http URL 中提取了491款视频游戏的元数据，这些游戏在GitHub上以开源项目形式发布。结果表明，开源游戏主要局限于有限的类型（益智、动作和平台类）；玩家评分（当可用时）往往较高，这带来一种社区对此类游戏接受度良好的感知；仓库大多处于休眠状态或维护极少；这些项目中的大多数采用Godot或Unity作为其游戏引擎；并且很少包含与测试相关的实践文档。这些结果提供了对开源视频游戏开发的见解，并可能有助于推进为小团队和独立游戏开发者设计的软件工程实践和工具。

英文摘要

Video games hold a prominent role in the entertainment industry, which constitutes a multibillion-dollar global market. Within this ecosystem, independent studios, small teams, and solo developers operate with constrained budgets while making their games available through platforms such as itch.io, where many projects are also available as open-source. Where even if the project is fully released, other developers can still have access to the development process through the source code, helping other developers to develop their own games. These open-source games also constitute a valuable corpus for empirical software engineering research, offering transparent access to development artifacts that are typically inaccessible in commercial projects. This study characterizes open-source video games from a Software Engineering standpoint, focusing on their genres, popularity, repository activity, implementation characteristics, and testing practices. To this end, we extracted metadata from 491 video games from itch.io, published as open-source projects in GitHub. The results indicate that open-source games predominantly fall within limited genres (Puzzle, Action, and Platformer), that player ratings, when available, tend to be high, bringing a perception that the community receives well those kind of games, that repositories are largely dormant or minimally maintained, that the majority of these projects adopt either Godot or Unity as their game engine, and that documentation of testing-related practices is seldom included. The results offer insights into the development of open-source video games and may contribute to advancing software engineering practices and tools designed for small teams and independent game developers.

发表机构

• Universidade Federal de São Carlos（圣卡洛斯联邦大学）
• Ontario Tech University（安大略理工大学）

机构由 AI 辅助整理，请以论文原文为准。