Technical Report
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Technical Report A Survey on a State of the Practice in Video Game Development Jürgen Musil1 Angelika Schweda1 Dietmar Winkler2 2 Stefan Biffl Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems Favoritenstr. 9-11, A-1040 Vienna, Austria 1{jmusil, angelika} @computer.org 2{dietmar.winkler, Stefan.biffl} @tuwien.ac.at Technical Report No. IFS-QSE 10/04 Issued: March 2010 A Survey on the State of the Practice in Video Game Software Development Juergen Musil1, Angelika Schweda1, Dietmar Winkler2, Stefan Biffl2 Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems Vienna University of Technology 1fjmusil, [email protected], 2fDietmar.Winkler, Stefan.Biffl[email protected] Abstract constant annual growth through 2013, seeing video games on top in home entertainment spending. It Video Game Software Development is a promising seems that such results draw a promising future area of empirical research because our first obser- for digital games, the development and production vations in industry environment identified a lack practices of the games industry are far from the of a systematic process and method support and professional level that sales figures may suggest. rarely conducted/documented studies. Neverthe- Game developers have to face workflow integration less, video games - specific types of software prod- problems, difficulties in requirement elicitation and ucts - focus strongly on user interface and game workload fluctuations due to a lack of verified do- design. Thus, engineering processes, methods for main tailord processes and techniques. Although game construction and verification/validation, and the video games industry seems rather turbulent, it best-practices, derived from traditional software en- presents itself as an interesting enviroment for em- gineering, might be applicable in context of video pricial software engineering that varies significantly game development. We selected the Austrian games from traditional software domains. Video games industry as a manageable and promising starting are interactive entertaiment products of high sys- point for systematically capturing the state-of-the tem complexity that are built upon multiple com- practice in Video game development. In this paper puter science disciplines including artificial intelli- we present the survey design and report on the first gence, computer graphics, distributed systems and results of a national survey in the Austrian games human computer interaction. Their production is industry. The results of the survey showed that the time critical and involves multiple heterogenious Austrian games industry is organized in a set of disciplines including experts from non-engineering small and young studios with the trend to ad-hoc domains (e.g. arts, design, animation, creative and flexible development processes and limitations writing). Because games premier purpose is amuse- in systematic method support. ment, validation of their entertaining impact relies on qualitative and quantitvative methods3. A good example demonstrating that software engineering 1 Introduction can indeed learn things from video game develop- Video game software development (VGSD) has ment is e.g. in the area of rapid development of maturated within only five decades from the hobby new software products [25]. of talented computer scientists into a billion dollar At the example of a state of the practice survey industry that today easily outperforms the movies in the Austrian games industry, we therefore seek industry in gross revenue. Top game software to investigate if empirical/evidence-based software projects have become artistic, technological and fi- engineering can be of assistance in providing so- nancial challenges with development costs ranging lutions for problems in VGSD and in identifying from few million up to 100 million dollars1. Ac- similarities and differences between game and non- cording to the recent PricewaterhouseCoopers me- game software development. Furthermore, the re- dia forecast2, the video game business is predicted a sults can (a) support video game producers in in- troducing lessons learn- ed from traditional soft- 1Digital Battle. http://www.digitalbattle.com/2010/02/ 20/top-10-most-expensive-video-games-budgets-ever 2009. (last visited 03/01/2010). 3Microsoft Game Studios, Games User Research 2PricewaterhouseCoopers. Global entertainment and Group. http://mgsuserresearch.com/publications/ (last vis- media outlook 2009-2013. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. ited 03/01/2010). 1 ware engineering to increase process and product of Think Service products and questions aim pre- quality and (b) can be the starting point for a dominantly demographics, hardware/software tool more detailed analysis of video game development usage, project budgeting and purchasing behavior. practice in a larger context. We are interested if A survey [16] dealing exclusively with game devel- conflict areas in processes and techniques in VGSD oper demographics has been conducted by the In- could be found that would be possible candidates ternational Game Developers Association (IGDA) for techniques from existing best-practice software in 2005. engineering. Also we seek to retrieve hands-on in- Since there is no widely validated body of knowl- formation about games industry-specific problems edge in VGSD available to date, we therefore also called "feature creep" and "crunch time" and their propose to follow the five steps of evidence-based causes. software engineering according to [10, 20]: The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents related work on video game de- 1. Converting the need for information into an velopment and best practice software engineering answerable question. approaches. Section 3 illustrates the research issues 2. Tracking down the best evidence with which with focus on best-practices in video game develop- to answer the question. ment. We described the study design of the survey in section 4 and provide initial results on the survey 3. Critically appraising that evidence for its va- in section 5. Section 6 presents the discussion. Fi- lidity, impact, and applicability. nally, section 7 concludes and identifies next steps 4. Integrating the critical appraisal with software for future work. engineering expertise and stakeholders' values. 5. Evaluating effectiveness and efficiency in exe- 2 Related Prior Work cuting steps 1-4 and seeking ways to improve these. This section summarizes related work on VGSD and best-practices software engineering approaches 2.2 Video game development with a particular focus on: (1) Examining the state of empirical studies in game software devel- Peltoniemi [26] evaluated the maturation process of opment processes. (2) Identifying major challenges the game sector and concludes that the game devel- in game software development and existing conflict opment sector after decades is still less developed areas. (3) Discussing the contemporary importance than the automobile industry in its most turbulent of best-practice software engineering. years of industry formation. One reason is that video game development has become increasingly challenging over the last decade [9, 12] with global 2.1 Existing Empirical Studies competition of creative concepts and a strong in- crease in systems complexity [15]. Games industry We have reviewed existing literature with particu- veteran Jonathan Blow has identified the follow- lar attention on empirical studies of game develop- ing obstacles in current video game development ment practices and processes. Unexpectedly, we [9]: (a) workflow problems in programming, testing have identified a significant lack of development and content production (e.g. 3D modeling, game process-focused publications and empirical studies, level design), (b) problems because of the concur- after investigating major computer science-related rent development for multiple target platforms (e.g. academic platforms (ACM, IEEE, Springer) as well PC, Playstation 3), (c) integration problems due as game industry/game studies related portals (DI- to a lack of domain-specific software patterns and GRA, Game Studies, Gamasutra). The only cur- a dependence on third-party components/game en- rent study among game studios that is methodically gines in order to maintain project timeliness, (d) comparable with our presented work is the State 4 project risks from trade-offs between game design of Game Development 2010 Survey from Think and product-value based considerations that Blow Services. The difference between our research and summarizes with the questions "how will this never- the Think Services survey is that our survey aims implemented feature feel to the end user? Is it go- to cover the Austrian game studios and to recheck ing to be worth [...] to implement it?" [9]. results from existing studies. Whereby the Think Petrillo et al. [27] note that many problems of Services survey has been conducted among clients the software industry occur in the electronic games industry as well. In their postmortem analysis 4Game Developer Research. State of Game Development 2009-2010 Survey. UBM Think Services. San Francisco, Petrillo et al. identified, besides technological prob- CA, 2010. lems that have been discussed by Blow [9], also 2 scheduling problems and problems of scope: cinematic design, audio/voice-over direction. Al- Scheduling problems occur in the form of classical though the previous list is not exhaustive it still project delays and crunch time, but are also often gives the impression that it resembles more activ- contributory