Towards an Understanding of Game Software Development Processes: A Case Study

O’Hagan, Ann Osborne; O’Connor, Rory V.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-24647-5_1

Cited by 8 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…McAllister and White 2015;O'Hagan and O'Connor 2015;Seung et al 2006). While the findings of these types of papers were often that standardization is unfeasible due to the unpredictable requirements inherent in game production, the conclusions were often that formalization needed to be pursued with different semantics so that developers understood their values better O'Hagan and O'Connor 2015), rather than acknowledging that the fluid practices that game developers use might be deliberate and carefully honed in spite of their sometimes chaotic appearance. In short, researchers' ways of considering a practice as being "mature" might be at odds with game developers' ways of working.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One theme that emerges clearly from the studied papers is that there is no standard for game development, and that developments methods are applied differently from how they are prescribed Koutonen and Leppänen, 2013;Lê et al 2013;Murphy-Hill et al 2014;O'Hagan and O'Connor 2015;Schmalz et al 2014;Stacey and Nandhakumar 2008;Walfisz et al 2006;Zackariasson et al 2006). Developers' reasons for deviating 1 3…”

Section: Methods In Theory and Executionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This naturally meant that the reviewed papers were highly reliant on case studies (e.g. Amanatiadou and Van De Weerd 2009;Cohendet and Simon 2007;McAllister and White 2015;Myllärniemi et al 2006;O'Hagan and O'Connor 2015;Vanhala and Kasurinen 2014). There were, however, some examples of research conducted on individual developers independently of any ongoing projects or studio work that dealt with experiences and attitudes towards their craft in a more general sense (e.g.…”

Section: Research Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The game studios studied in the reviewed papers differ from one another both in terms of size and organizational structure, ranging from small startup companies with a few people working on a single project (e.g. Llerena et al 2009;O'Hagan and O'Connor 2015;Tran and Biddle 2008) to large established AAA studios with hundreds of employees working on multiple projects, sometimes across international borders (Cohendet and Simon 2007;Drachen et al 2013;Walfisz et al 2006); a number of studios fell somewhere in-between the two extremes (Hotho and Champion 2011;Myllärniemi et al 2006;Nelson and Palumbo 2014). The studied game studios also worked with different platforms, such as PC Walfisz et al 2006) mobile (Kultima 2010;Llerena et al 2009;Myllärniemi et al 2006) console (McAllister and White 2015) and web-browsers (Tran and Biddle 2008).…”

Section: Tablementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The vast majority of papers that discuss requirements as an aspect of game development characterize them as being highly subjective (Alves et al 2007;Murphy-Hill et al 2014;O'Hagan and O'Connor 2015), unpredictable Tran and Biddle 2008), and flexible (Daneva 2014;Schmalz et al 2014). The subjectivity is often tied to the artefact itself, as gameplay goals (e.g.…”

Section: Requirements Subjectivity and Flexibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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What Empirically Based Research Tells Us About Game Development

et al. 2019

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This paper reviews empirically grounded research on practices in game development with the intent to give a comprehensive overview of contemporary development practices used in the video game industry. While there are many intangible elements that inform game development processes, this review specifically covers the more immediate practical challenges. The review covers a total of 48 papers published between 2006 and 2016, which were all subjected to thematic analysis by three reviewers. The results of the review show that an almost universal characteristic of game development is that it is almost impossible to accurately plan a development project in detail, largely due to the soft requirements inherent in game production which emerge mid-process during development projects, during when testing is coupled with continuous ideation and refinement. Practicing game developers have created their own frameworks that accommodate for this lack of planning. They include flat hierarchies, democratic decision-making, creative autonomy, and informal communication, which are designed to create an environment that maintains creativity and openness to product changes long into the production process. These frameworks vary significantly between studios and often between individual projects. This review also shows that the term ‘Agile’, while often used by both researchers and developers to characterize the process of game development, is not an apt descriptor of how game developers actually work. Agile is used as shorthand for unstructured and flexible development, rather than serving as a descriptor of a definable or unified work method. Finally, as companies develop more complicated hierarchies of stakeholders and staff, the desired flexibility and autonomy of game development becomes increasingly complicated to maintain, and often necessitates more formalized management processes and company structures. In these cases, inherent tensions of game development become more pronounced, and continuous creativity is hard to maintain due to a growing need to formalize processes.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methods In Theory and Executionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Research Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Tablementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Requirements Subjectivity and Flexibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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What Empirically Based Research Tells Us About Game Development

et al. 2019

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Learning from the past: A process recommendation system for video game projects using postmortems experiences

Politowski

Fontoura

Petrillo

et al. 2018

Information and Software Technology

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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, summarizing the experience of their game development team. This approach aims to provide reflections about development processes used in the game industry as well as guidance to developers to choose the most adequate process according to the contexts they're in. Method: Our approach is divided in three separate phases: in the the first phase, we manually extracted the processes from the postmortems analysis; in the second one, we created a video game context and algorithm rules for recommendation; and finally in the third phase, we evaluated the recommended processes by using quantitative and qualitative metrics, game developers feedback, and a case study by interviewing a video game development team. Contributions: This article brings three main contributions. The first describes a database of developers' experiences extracted from postmortems in the form of development processes. The second defines the main attributes that a video game project contain, which it uses to define the contexts of the project. The third describes and evaluates a recommendation system for video game projects, which uses the contexts of the projects to identify similar projects and suggest a set of activities in the form of a process.

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