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Game design as an autonomous research subject.

1. Introduction

2. related work, 3. complementary methods, 3.1. game design books, 3.2. notations and tools, 3.3. frameworks, 4. core methods and game design literacy, 4.1. game design patterns, 4.2. game design pattern learning, 4.3. game design literacy, 5. defining games for method, 5.1. the dynamic analog dilemmas principle, 5.2. example of the dynamic analog dilemma, 6. conclusions, author contributions, conflicts of interest.

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Neves, P.P.; Zagalo, N. Game Design as an Autonomous Research Subject. Information 2021 , 12 , 367. https://doi.org/10.3390/info12090367

Neves PP, Zagalo N. Game Design as an Autonomous Research Subject. Information . 2021; 12(9):367. https://doi.org/10.3390/info12090367

Neves, Pedro Pinto, and Nelson Zagalo. 2021. "Game Design as an Autonomous Research Subject" Information 12, no. 9: 367. https://doi.org/10.3390/info12090367

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What Empirically Based Research Tells Us About Game Development

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• Published: 24 September 2019
• Volume 8 , pages 179–198, ( 2019 )

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• Björn Berg Marklund   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1458-8557 1 ,
• Henrik Engström 1 ,
• Marcus Hellkvist 1 &
• Per Backlund 1  

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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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1 Introduction

Research related to games has been steadily growing in popularity since the turn of the millennium. Between 2006 and 2016, for example, the annual publication of game documents (i.e. books, journal articles, conference papers, or chapters) rose from ~ 900 to ~ 3200 (Martin 2018 ). However, even though the academic output regarding games has been steadily increasing in volume, the processes through which games are actually produced are still relatively obscure (Martin 2018 ; Petrillo et al. 2008 ). In a recent literature review published in Game Studies , Paul Martin states that games are subject to scrutiny by experts from a myriad of different fields, but that scholars all primarily focus on understanding games’ potential ‘effects’, which is strongly linked to understanding their design (Martin 2018 ). In one of his paper’s concluding paragraphs, Martin posits that there are:

… potential gaps in game research. […] While other authors may occasionally discuss the game industries, no other authors have this as their main research topic. Furthermore, none of the non-game authors cited are experts on business or industry. (Martin 2018 )

In this paper, we present a literature review which addresses that particular potential gap, and surveys the development and production processes that underpin the games industry. Game development is often described in general terms with vague definitions, such as being subjective, flexible, and agile (Kortmann and Harteveld 2009 ; O’Hagan et al. 2014 ; Petrillo and Pimenta 2010 ). While these descriptors are not necessarily incorrect—in fact, as they are so often used they are likely to be fairly accurate—they are not particularly beneficial in helping the reader understanding what is actually happening during game development projects. As games are a complicated intermingling of various crafts and disciplines (e.g. audiovisual arts, design and user experience, genre conventions and tradition, software and hardware engineering, management, business and marketing, etc.) each game, and each studio developing it, is bound to have some unique quirks. Even though a universal answer is unlikely to exist, this review is an attempt to identify and highlight some of the patterns and commonalities that unify development practices.

An important distinction made in this review is that it is not concerned with hypothetical best practice prescriptions. There are many examples of research studies that describe how games should be developed: correlations between game design and models from UX and heuristics are made (e.g. Bernhaupt 2015 ; Koeffel et al. 2010 ); the viability of software development and standardizations on game development are discussed (e.g. Dormans 2012 ; Srisuriyasavad and Prompoon 2013 ); and project management and planning research are argued to be suitable approaches for solving challenges inherent in game development (e.g. McGregor 2013 ; Trantow et al. 2013 ; Vallance 2014 ; Vanhala and Kasurinen 2014 ). A persistent issue within this research field, however, is that such studies are rarely carried out by, or with input from, practitioners and experts from the games industry, and a large portion of literature on game development thus rarely takes everyday realities of practices into account (Martin 2018 ). With this in mind, this literature review specifically aims to examine how game development is described by individuals involved in game development, and thus this review exclusively focuses on empirically grounded research conducted on game developers and game development studios in order to present a picture of how games are developed.

The review presented in this article is part of a comprehensive literature study aiming to explore game development from a broad perspective, covering a wide set of disciplines. The details of the fundamental method of the study are described in Engström et al. ( 2018 ). To briefly summarize the literature selection process, a series of keywords related to game development, software engineering, and creative industries were used in several wide-reaching databases (Scopus, Springer, ACM, and DiGRA’s digital archives) to generate an initial set of 2278 publications. Through title and abstract analysis, this set was reduced to a set of 488 papers that were reviewed and coded. Two particular outcomes of this process are a research quality evaluation, and a case description that identifies whether a paper’s outcomes were based on empirical data from the games industry. The study presented in this article addresses one of four research questions identified in Engström et al. ( 2018 ), namely, “What are the current development practices used in the video games industry?” (p. 12).

It should be noted that the selection process was not limited to a pre-defined set of geographic regions. However, European and North American research studies dominate this area, so papers by authors from these regions are prominent in this review. The selection process involved identifying only papers written in English. It should also be noted that the vast majority of articles relating to game development have taken little or no consideration of regional aspects in their research approaches, and regional aspects that might affect game development are seldom discussed.

From the larger set of 488 articles, by applying the aforementioned method classifications, quality evaluations, and case descriptions, we have filtered out papers to produce a subset of 48 papers that fulfil the criteria that provide the foundation for this review: they contain empirical data from industry practitioners (i.e. not development conducted under academic auspices); they display a high quality of research (in terms of clearly stated research question, method description, and results); and, they are relevant to our understanding to the practices of game development.

The selected papers were subjected to a thematic analysis of the papers’ contents by the three reviewers. Thematic analysis is, as described by Braun and Clarke ( 2006 , p. 6), “a method for identifying, analysing, and reporting patterns (themes) within data. It minimally organises and describes your data set in (rich) detail. However, it also often goes further than this, and interprets various aspects of the research topic…” As this review aims to identify patterns and themes which can describe game development, the qualitative-oriented nature of thematic analysis is suitable for doing in-depth content analysis of the sizeable amount of data which this review entails. The process was conducted using the MAXQDA qualitative analysis software program (VERBI GmbH 1995 ) which allowed the three reviewers to analyse and keep personal notes on the papers independently of one another, and to later merge their work to see if there were obvious points of disagreements or agreements regarding the papers’ content.

The entire process can be divided into three distinct phases: a preparation phase, a content processing phase, and an analysis phase. These phases entailed a total of 6 steps.

Phase 1: Preparation

Familiarization and initial coding the full set of papers was quickly and manually surveyed by the three reviewers. Not only did this serve to familiarize the reviewers with the material under review, but each reviewer also wrote down suggestions of code categories, which were then discussed in a reviewer meeting. In this initial coding step, all reviewers devised their own set of codes independently from one another, which ultimately resulted in an amount of codes that would be unfeasible to process in a reasonable timeframe. Many of these codes were also overlapping or semantically identical, even though the reviewers phrased them slightly differently, compounding the codes’ unsuitability for a continued reviewing process.

Establishing a unified code vocabulary in order to establish a more unified code vocabulary between the reviewers, two papers (Musil et al. 2010 ; Vallance 2014 ) were subjected to a round of test-coding. After using the initial code set on the first paper (Musil et al. 2010 ) the reviewers met to discuss the definitions, usefulness, accuracy, and potential interpretations of the different codes. After refining the code set based on these discussions, the process was repeated once more with the second paper (Vallance 2014 ). These trial runs served the purpose of ensuring that reviewers agreed upon code phrasings that risked having multiple interpretations, as having reviewers interpret codes in their own different ways would complicate later analysis stages significantly. The established code set was imported into the MAXQDA program, providing each reviewer with the same baseline template for the content analysis and coding that was to follow.

Phase 2: Processing the Full Set of 48 Papers

Secondary content processing and coding each of the three reviewers analysed the complete set of 48 papers by reading through them and marking text segments with codes from the established code categories. Every reviewer was given a different starting point in the data set, in order to minimize the potential impact of reviewers’ fatigue affecting the coding of a few particular papers too heavily. This process resulted in a total of 5190 coded segments.

Reviewer code synthesis with all the material coded, the three reviewers’ coding projects in MAXQDA were merged to create a unified team version of the coded material. This version, which included all 48 papers with all reviewers’ codes, provided the primary foundation for the next phase of the thematic analysis, in which the material was analysed to see which themes and patterns praxis emerged from the coded material.

Phase 3: Code Analysis, Theme Creation, and Report Compilation

Searching for themes the compiled and coded materials were analysed by the three reviewers to search for themes. While some themes emerged from the material rather quickly, the reviewers did not discriminate between themes of varied weight. The result from the initial analysis was a highlighting of various themes and the codes associated with them, which was discussed during reviewer meetings and subsequently used as the foundation for the final step of the process.

Defining and naming themes after establishing an initial set of themes, the review group took them into consideration in preparation for another set of meetings to better define the roots of the themes in coded material, and to name the themes appropriately to make them easier to present and describe in this paper. The various connections between coded segments and the themes were mapped out more clearly, and the reviewers ensured that the various nuances of positives and negatives surrounding each theme (as stated by developers in the empirical data) were properly represented.

3 Review Results

As previously mentioned, the coding process resulted in 5190 coded segments. After the subsequent reviewing and further analysis of the compiled coded material, several clear themes emerged from the coded material. In essence, a theme constitutes an empirically supported pattern of experiences, observations, or statements made in the reviewed papers. If many coded segments from the studied cases had expressed similar challenges or solutions to various aspects of their development practices, the reviewers would cluster these code segments together to create a more unifying theme that described these similarities. The process resulted in eight themes clustered under the two main theme categories: creating an experience , and creating a product . Table  1 presents the themes and the papers from which they are derived.

4 Research Overview

As per the criteria of the paper sampling process, all papers included empirical findings from game developers. 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. Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 ; Wang and Nordmark 2015 ). As for data gathering methods, most of the reviewed papers relied primarily on qualitative methods, and semi-structured interviews were particularly common (Kasurinen et al. 2013 , 2014 ; Kultima 2010 ). Some papers also used surveys, often to supplement or support the material gathered through interviews (Koutonen and Leppänen 2013 ; Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 ; Wang and Nordmark 2015 ). There were also a couple of examples of ethnographic research, in which the authors either recounted their own experiences working in development teams in the past (Walfisz et al. 2006 ) or kept journaled accounts of on-going development processes (Bryant et al. 2010 ; Cohendet and Simon 2007 ; Nelson and Palumbo 2014 ).

The vast majority of studied cases focused on what could be classified as more “straight forward” entertainment products for various platforms. There were a few exceptions, however, that focused on development of serious games (Ruggiero and Watson 2014 ; Tran and Biddle 2008 ). In this review, we do not make a particular distinction between the genres of games being developed, and we consider serious game developers to also be part of the broader games industry.

The investigated game companies in these papers have a varied international spread. Research studies in northern Europe and Canada constitute the largest portion of the reviewed set, while other regions are more sparsely represented. For example, no papers mention anything about Australian or African game development, making them the only excluded continents. Several papers investigate several game studios from different countries simultaneously (Chung and Fung 2013 ; Musial et al. 2015 ; Stacey and Nandhakumar 2008 ), while the most common approach seems to be to focus on one particular region; this is likely due to the researchers’ chosen methods (interviews) making it preferable to confine their study to one region (Hotho and Champion 2011 ; Zackariasson et al. 2006 ). Some of the papers do not include any descriptions of where the study was conducted (Drachen et al. 2013 ; O’Hagan et al. 2014 ; Tran and Biddle 2008 ).

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 (Kasurinen et al. 2013 ; 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 ). It is difficult to determine whether there is a significant weighting towards any particular platform as many papers did not clearly state the examined studio’s target platform, and many studios also worked across many different platforms simultaneously. Thus, the set of reviewed papers seem to represent many different types of game development situations.

4.1 Creating an Experience

The first main theme in the studied material relates to how the game experience is created. This includes questions such as: how game ideas are born; when and how is the game design made; and what is the role of game testing. Testing, design, and ideation may not be exclusively relevant to game development as they, for example, happen in software and information system development as well. They are, however, uniquely approached in game development in that they are considerations that extend beyond functionality and effectivity. Many of the reviewed papers aimed to understand this distinctive characteristic of game development, making it a frequently recurring and nuanced theme in this analysis.

4.1.1 Creativity and Ideation

Creativity is an aspect of game development that is addressed in a majority of the papers. In many of them, there is an explicit focus on creativity and innovation in game development (Hagen 2012 ; Hodgson and Briand 2013 ; Hotho and Champion 2011 ; Kultima 2010 ; Lê et al. 2013 ; Llerena et al. 2009 ; Musial et al. 2015 ; Tschang and Szczypula 2006 ).

One theme that is present in most articles relates to knowledge architecture and the flow of ideas in game production. This includes the inspiration of original game ideas (Hagen 2012 ; Kultima 2010 ), how ideas transform during the process (Kultima 2010 ; Tschang and Szczypula 2006 ), and how ideas are formed in the interplay between different development groups and testers (Cohendet and Simon 2007 ; Lê et al. 2013 ; Simon 2006 ; Stacey et al. 2007 ; Wang and Nordmark 2015 ). There are strong indications that the creative endeavours in the game industry involve many individuals, and that collaboration is important:

The sources of creativity as well as efficiency at [Company] rely on a subtle alchemy among communities of scriptwriters, game-designers, graphic artists, sound designers, software programmers and even testers. The team is important for the creative process. (Cohendet and Simon 2007 , p. 591)

Not only are interpersonal relationships important for this type of creative ideation, but several studies (Lê et al. 2013 ; Stacey and Nandhakumar 2008 , 2009 ; Tschang and Szczypula 2006 ; Wang and Nordmark 2015 ) also report how the interplay between ideas and the technology used to realize them affect the process. New technological possibilities, as well as limitations in the technology and even bugs, can give rise to new game concepts. The creative game development process is non-linear, whereby ideas evolve during the development and test process: “Game ideas are prone to be altered in one way or another during the design process. This was emphasized by virtually all of the interviewees” (Kultima 2010 , p. 36).

A related issue observed in a large number of papers (Cohendet and Simon 2007 ; Hotho and Champion 2011 ; Kultima 2010 ; Musial et al. 2015 ; Simon 2006 ) is how creativity affects management of the game development process. These studies give a uniform message that creativity implies the need for more flexible processes, room for collaboration, and openness to change. As stated in one paper, “Management of creativity at work is merely seen as the art of setting the material, social and symbolic limits of the workspace collectively experienced as a creative play-ground” (Simon 2006 , p. 121).

The auteur tradition, which is strong in the movie industry, has very limited support in the game industry. Only one study (Hotho and Champion 2011 ) reports on a case where one person tried to control the whole creative process. This study reports on how this effort had several negative consequences. In summary, the empirical studies on game development give a relatively uniform picture: that creativity is achieved through a collaborative, test-driven process where structure, documentation and control are de-emphasized.

4.1.2 Testing and Player Experience

Despite the lack of standard development methods and loose requirement specifications, game features, feature changes, and development goals still have to originate from somewhere. Play testing is an activity that is highlighted in many studies as one of these origins, and is often described as tightly connected to the “player experience” goal that many game developers pursue. As summarized by one interviewee in Kasurinen and Smolander ( 2014 ), “You can plan for a large number of things, but ultimately the final decision is made when actual people try out the idea.” Overall, developers are highly aware of, and accepting towards, change, and it is treated as an inevitable part of the process and crucial for honing the experience: “The game experience rules. Change is imperative” (Walfisz et al. 2006 , p. 492).

This has implications on the conception of a product, and in particular how developers discuss the scope of a prototyping process. In game development companies the term ‘prototype’ is used in broad sense to refer to a game under development and its large number of different incarnations throughout the development process:

Further, the first prototypes produced by the R&D team are replaced by others (including the one working with the SDK), which will subsequently be replaced by game prototypes. In a sense, there are only prototypes in videogame development. (Lê et al. 2013 , p. 55)

The role of testing and player experience strongly influences the way game development is organised. Many studies report that companies adopt some kind of staged process. A common structure is to have the following four stages: ideation, pre-production, production, and post-production. A stage-gate methodology is discussed in some cases (Cohendet and Simon 2007 ; Hodgson and Briand 2013 ; Zackariasson et al. 2006 ), but it appears that the nature of game production makes it hard for developers to adhere to it even at its most general formulation. Play testing is conducted in all stages of the development process, and the result of these tests can have an impact on the product, irrespective of phase. As stated by an interviewee: “If a tester comes to say that this does not work, there is not fun in it, you really cannot leave that in the game, you have to fix it” (Kasurinen et al. 2013 , p. 14).

The testing of the game may also lead to the identification of new ideas (see Creativity), which were not possible to foresee at an early ideation stage. Ideas can appear in all stages of game production, and they can originate from any of the involved actors, including testers: “You never know where the next great idea is coming from—as we saw at Goo, some even came from secretaries” (Stacey and Nandhakumar 2008 , p. 145).

Interestingly, only a few studies (Koutonen and Leppänen 2013 ; Petrillo et al. 2009 ; Walfisz et al. 2006 ) discuss the concept of ‘feature creep’, which is a risk that arises when changes are allowed during all stages of production. Since it is difficult to clearly identify which features (e.g. themes, game mechanics, aesthetics, technologies, etc.) will ultimately result in the desired player experience, game developers often remain open to new ideas late in the production process (Petrillo et al. 2009 ). The main downside of this open-ended ideation is the high risk of feature creep, which is present in game development to a larger degree than in, for example, software development (Wang and Nordmark 2015 ). Developers try to minimize this risk by emphasizing a flexible and comprehensive early stage of game production (Cohendet and Simon 2007 ; Schmalz et al. 2014 ). Companies can have several potential products in the ideation and pre-production phases, and early and frequent playtesting of these prototypes will determine which should go into production. One of the papers conclude that the open-ended nature of game development is inherently risky, but that “the project structure itself often mitigated risk by emphasizing prototyping, pre-production and the early jettison of troubled projects” (Schmalz et al. 2014 , p. 4332).

4.1.3 Requirements, Subjectivity and Flexibility

The vast majority of papers that discuss requirements as an aspect of game development characterize them as being highly subjective (Alves et al. 2007 ; Kasurinen et al. 2014 ; Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 ; O’Hagan and O’Connor 2015 ), unpredictable (Kasurinen et al. 2014 ; 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. aesthetic goals, or gameplay goals such as being fun or thrilling) are mentioned as something that is difficult to approach in a formalized and well-defined way (Kasurinen et al. 2014 ; Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 ). While the subjective concept of “fun” has often been described as something defined by the developers themselves in smaller studios (Zackariasson et al. 2006 ), larger studios have used identified subjective preferences and usability concerns of their target audiences as a guiding requirement (Alves et al. 2007 ; Bryant et al. 2010 ; Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 ). The unpredictability and changing nature of requirements are mostly discussed in terms of how they necessitate iterative working processes (Schmalz et al. 2014 ). Constant team communication (Land and Wilson 2006 ; Tran and Biddle 2008 ) and testing (Cohendet and Simon 2007 ; Kasurinen et al. 2014 ; Tran and Biddle 2008 ; Walfisz et al. 2006 ) are often mentioned as efficient means in scoping out and identifying requirements as production progresses. In essence, the nature of requirements in game development is often seen as one of the primary causes for why game development processes turn out the way they do.

This subjectivity is what distinguishes game requirements from other software development practices. For example (Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 ) highlight this stark difference through interviews with game developers who have also had non-game software development experience. According to their work, game requirements differ from those of regular software development, and requirements also vary from game to game, meaning that there are few, if any, constant transferable requirements between games (Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 ; Wang and Nordmark 2015 ). A developer interviewed in (Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 ) for example, stated that:

… in an e-commerce application, a user has a task to complete that typically takes only a few minutes. … the requirement for games is that the user should be able to stay engaged on multiple timescales, and the mechanism to achieve that will vary from game to game. (Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 , p. 4)

When requirements are mentioned, they are often seen as a necessity due to their prevalence in traditional software development (Kasurinen et al. 2014 ; Land and Wilson 2006 ; Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 ); however, their merits and actual practical application in game development is debatable. In one of the reviewed papers, for example, developers were asked to evaluate how applicable ISO standardized software development processes were to their own working processes, to which they responded: “The first thing I see here is that requirement analysis is completely done before construction. So design is finished before anything is implemented… that’s just not the way it happens” (Kasurinen et al. 2014 , p. 13). For most game developers, requirements are rarely seen as an identified goal that must be fulfilled, but rather something that is to be discovered during the development process (Daneva 2014 ; Tran and Biddle 2008 ).

4.1.4 The Technology and Creativity Schism

The general ebb and flow of control and unrestricted creativity constitute a common thread in the material, and has often been described as a source of ambivalence and conflict:

We also found that conflicts may occur between designers and developers. This happens because game designers, who are especially creative individuals, generally try to include features that are very hard to implement. They argue that such features may improve the gameplay and the overall look and feel of the game. However, there is no formal process to assess that; just common-sense is used. Normally, the final game is the result of trade-offs among creative design, technical constraints and platforms constraints. (Alves et al. 2007 , p. 279)

A constant thread is the strong emphasis on the importance of a communal, democratic, and flexible production pipeline (e.g. role overlap, informal communication, team-based decisions, and shared knowledge architecture). Creativity was also equally emphasized as the driving force, and ultimate outcome, of game production (Kasurinen and Smolander 2014 ). There were, however, a few notable exceptions to this openness and flexibility: developers working with the software and technology aspects of game production had a comparatively protective approach to their work and contributions. Programmers in game studios could, for example, regard management with various levels of distrust if they were perceived to lack the necessary technological know-how to make realistic decisions (Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 ; Wang and Nordmark 2015 ).

In some cases, this concern was proven to be well founded, as managers sometimes professed to lacking the necessary understanding of implementation for making sound evaluations and management decisions regarding software aspects of game development; this could sometimes jeopardize a project’s success (Schmalz et al. 2014 ). Programmers sometimes held a similar level of distrust towards their peers working in different disciplines of production—perhaps more so towards graphics artists and designers—whose creativity could seem detached from realistic implementation (Alves et al. 2007 ; Kasurinen and Smolander 2014 ; Stacey and Nandhakumar 2009 ):

When a game-designer asks a programmer to design an animated “rope” as a decorative object in a virtual setting, he thinks its a very simple task and does not understand the rebuttal from the programmer, rather promoting a stick. (Simon 2006 , p. 120)

In essence, programming and technological knowledge seem to be under-appreciated and misunderstood in terms of their contribution to creativity (Kasurinen and Smolander 2014 ; Musial et al. 2015 ; Simon 2006 ; Wang and Nordmark 2015 ). In a study by Kasurinen and Smolander ( 2014 ), this was coupled with a sentiment that programming was the linchpin making the creation of games fundamentally possible: “…In their perspective the software development work was the actual requirement to create a game; without programming skills there would be no game product, but even without a competent artist you could create at least something.”

While input and ideas from designers and artists are of course seen as an important part of the production process, they could be regarded with increased skepticism if they came from colleagues with little programming knowledge.

4.2 Creating a Product

The second main theme in the studied material concerns the industrialization of game production. This theme is focused on how production aspects, applicable in most production processes, are approached in the games industry. This includes project management, documentation, planning and the role of tools used during production.

4.2.1 Methods in Theory and Execution

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 (Kasurinen et al. 2014 ; Kasurinen and Smolander 2014 ; 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 from established project management and software engineering methods mainly stem from the focus on player experience (Kultima 2010 ; Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 ; Walfisz et al. 2006 ; Wang and Nordmark 2015 ). As stated by Hodgson and Briand ( 2013 ): “Our results suggest that game developers focus on soft values such as game content or user experience, instead of more traditional objectives such as reliability or efficiency.”

Many companies’ working methods are based on concepts from Agile development philosophy (Kasurinen and Smolander 2014 ; Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 ; Nelson and Palumbo 2014 ; Schmalz et al. 2014 ; Stacey and Nandhakumar 2008 ; Walfisz et al. 2006 ), but there are indications of challenges and problems when Agile is put into a game development context. One reason identified for this is the mix of professions involved in game production:

We’ve got so many specialists on the team, so the kind of planning that you usually do in Agile doesn’t work quite so well… You know [specialists] are more concerned about the creative process than an engineering process. (Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 , p. 7)

The Agile methods are thus applied unorthodoxly, compared to the “regular” software industry, which regards Agile, and associated processes such as Scrum and eXtreme Programming, as being flexible but relying on an underlying structure and framework of planning, iterations, and backlogs (Hodgson and Briand 2013 ). This is, again, exemplified by studies which have analysed the applicability of ISO development standards in game development, and which conclude that the standard is difficult to implement in game companies (Kasurinen et al. 2013 , 2014 ). Interviewed developers in other studies state, in clear terms, that Agile is unsuitable for their working processes: “We have a problem because the artists aren’t Agile. They detest it! … That’s a problem. There’s a dual system happening here.” (Hodgson and Briand 2013 , p. 320).

The challenge of controlling and standardizing the process of creating a product that is largely unpredictable and open to creative input until a very late stage of development is an issue that has been discussed in many papers (Cohendet and Simon 2007 ; Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 ; O’Hagan et al. 2014 ; Tschang and Szczypula 2006 ; Wang and Nordmark 2015 ), and these discussions are anchored in many different parts of the development ecosystem. It has been described as an issue with requirements, creative autonomy, technical constraints, or as a management issue, which might suggest that game development does not easily adhere to one particular methodological framework.

4.2.2 Documentation and Shared Objects for Collaborations

A strong trend in the game development literature is a very low focus on documentation and a strong focus on playable prototypes. The most frequently mentioned documentation (Alves et al. 2007 ; Kasurinen et al. 2014 ; Stacey and Nandhakumar 2009 ; Wimmer and Sitnikova 2011 ) is the game design document. It is worth noting that several of these studies more often identify shortcomings than benefits with the documental approach to game design. For example: “Even an apparently complete [game design document] is likely to change during the development process” (Alves et al. 2007 , p. 278). Or, as stated by an interviewee: “When the production started, the specifications went out of the window… There simply is not enough knowledge to make a full design at the early stage.” (Kasurinen et al. 2013 , p. 14).

In place of an agreed-upon design document, one important element of the development process that is addressed in several studies comprises the softer aspects of team cohesion and interdisciplinary collaboration (Cohendet and Simon 2007 ; Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 ; Tran and Biddle 2008 ; Wang and Nordmark 2015 ). Frequent and open knowledge-sharing (Cohendet and Simon 2007 ; Dezso et al. 2010 ; Llerena et al. 2009 ) and continuous informal dialogue (Tran and Biddle 2008 ) emerged in the papers as more widely used methods of keeping a team’s collaborative creative vision intact during development. For example:

It’s very much a dialogue, we try not to have too formal split between tech and creative team when thinking about this, but prioritize what the user experience should be and when we can ship at target quality. (Wang and Nordmark 2015 , p. 279) Learning about experiences from others exposes each member to the different aspects of the game development process. As a result, the team is more empathetic to different disciplinary perspectives and approaches. (Tran and Biddle 2008 , p. 51)

It is also important to note that the producer is sometimes highlighted as having an important role in facilitating these processes; however, almost none of the reviewed papers focused on describing the role of the producer in game development, with only Schmalz et al. ( 2014 ) being a notable exception.

4.2.3 The Tools Used in Game Development

Software tools within game development are sparingly discussed in the reviewed literature. The papers that discuss software tools to a larger degree (Kasurinen et al. 2013 , 2014 ; Kasurinen and Smolander 2014 ; Llerena et al. 2009 ; O’Donnell 2011 ; Wang and Nordmark 2015 ; Vanhala and Kasurinen 2014 ) clearly highlight the differences between game studios and how they use them. Some game studios create their own development tools from scratch, some modify existing ones, and some use third-party tools to create games. There is a difference between how these tools are selected and used, depending on company structure and size (Kasurinen et al. 2013 , 2014 ; Stacey and Nandhakumar 2009 ). Small-to-medium sized game studios in particular outsource their game engine development (Kasurinen et al. 2013 , 2014 ; Kasurinen and Smolander 2014 ; Wang and Nordmark 2015 ; Vanhala and Kasurinen 2014 ). The tools used in larger organizations reflect a more structured and formalized development process. Development support tools such as version control and file-sharing services, however, are commonly used in game development organizations, irrespective of size.

The articles that do discuss software tools often focus on the importance of an effective tool pipeline, tool selection and usage, and game developers’ experience. The use of software tools is very dependent on organization and surrounding circumstances. Therefore, they are often used differently.

4.2.4 Requirements, Structure and Formalization

There are a few specific areas in game development in which requirements are described in a more “traditional” manner as a list of fixed, objective, necessary goals that developers need to achieve. In papers dealing with large development projects, for example, AAA studios working with external stakeholders such as publishers, platform holders or investors, technical requirements seem to become significantly more explicit and static (Cohendet and Simon 2007 ; Hodgson and Briand 2013 ; Walfisz et al. 2006 ). For example, games released on major hardware-specific platforms (e.g. Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo consoles, or different brands of phones) need to adhere to rigorous lists of requirements on performance, compatibility, and usability; in essence, software architecture seems to be one of the main areas of games that have rigorous requirements (Alves et al. 2007 ; McAllister and White 2015 ; Myllärniemi et al. 2006 ; Stacey et al. 2007 ; Wang and Nordmark 2015 ).

In situations where spontaneous communication is difficult, there is a need for formalized documentation and requirements (Alves et al. 2007 ; Schmalz et al. 2014 ; Stacey et al. 2007 ). In companies that did extensive outsourcing, or engaged in other forms of cross-company collaborations, requirements are often described as a crucial tool to ensure that the—normally quite messy and informal—act of game development could be channelled towards a clear goal (Hodgson and Briand 2013 ; Stacey and Nandhakumar 2008 ). In these cases, requirements seem to be used as a form of risk management, as it gives stakeholders an opportunity to present their expectations on developers’ performances, which developers then become beholden to (Hodgson and Briand 2013 ; Stacey et al. 2007 ; Walfisz et al. 2006 ).

In summary, there is no real consensus on the exact requirements for game development. The use of formalized requirements in development seems to be closely tied to a game studio’s size and “maturity”.

5 Discussion and Conclusion

The picture that the 48 reviewed papers paints of game development is a complex and ambivalent one: games are created in an entangled web of content development intertwined with production processes, in which technological and creative requirements may clash but also give rise to new opportunities.

There are some themes that emerged from this review that are prevalent enough across cases that they can be considered general truisms of game development. There is a conspicuous avoidance of firm methods and explicitly unified language among developers, and ad-hoc development driven by subjective experience requirements is the most prevalent praxis across the industry. The outcome of this review puts into question whether ‘Agile’ is actually an apt description of the development model that game projects employ. Several of the reviewed papers stated that while Agile is a term often used to describe game development due to its association with flexibility, game developers rarely use actual Agile methods (Hodgson and Briand 2013 ; Koutonen and Leppänen 2013 ; Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 ; Schmalz et al. 2014 ; Stacey and Nandhakumar 2008 ). As phrased in one of the papers, “Interviewees [implied] that Agile is sometimes a euphemism for a lack of process.” (Murphy-Hill et al. 2014 , p. 6) Some developers also more or less explicitly stated that Agile is not a good fit for their working processes (Hodgson and Briand 2013 ; Koutonen and Leppänen 2013 ).

Practicing game developers have created frameworks that accommodate for this lack of planning, including flat hierarchies, democratic decision-making, creative autonomy, and informal communication, which create an environment that maintains creativity and openness to product changes long into the production process (Cohendet and Simon 2007 ; Llerena et al. 2009 ; Tran and Biddle 2008 ). A prevalent theme in the reviewed studies is that play-testing has a central role in all phases of game development (Kasurinen and Smolander 2014 ).

Some of the reviewed papers seem to be focused on making game development more “mature” by arguing for ways of standardizing (e.g. employing ISO standards) game development practices (e.g. Kasurinen et al. 2013 ; 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 (Kasurinen et al. 2013 ; 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.

That being said, however, one interesting outcome from this research is that there is an uncertainty regarding whether even developers’ stated impression of what game development is, matches what they actually do. The general axiom of games being subjective, and game development thriving under flexibility and autonomous work, might be so strong as to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. One paper in particular featured an interesting case where an increase in studio autonomy in relation to creative direction (i.e. dropping external stakeholders to focus on the development team’s own intellectual properties) led to a more complicated and unhealthy working climate due to increasing economic uncertainty and changed power dynamics (Hotho and Champion 2011 ). Another paper raised the issue that, despite the conviction that Agile work processes facilitate autonomy and prevent the emergence of stifling power structures, empirical studies of developers’ day-to-day work have “highlighted the persistence of power hierarchies within and around the project team” (Hodgson and Briand 2013 ). Yet another paper brought up the issue of developers’ perceptions and expectations of their colleagues’ and their own passion for development leading to a form of peer pressure, which subsequently worked to maintain and exacerbate unhealthy working climates (Marie-Josée and Kathleen 2012 ). These types of findings suggest that the processes that developers pursue and value might not always be positive. While this review does not intend to provide prescriptions for how the craft of game development should evolve in the future, the outcomes do hint at a need to examine whether or not these universally agreed-upon practices exist because of the inherent values they bring to development projects, or if they primarily persist due to tradition.

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Berg Marklund, B., Engström, H., Hellkvist, M. et al. What Empirically Based Research Tells Us About Game Development. Comput Game J 8 , 179–198 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40869-019-00085-1

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• Petersen J Carvalho V Oliveira J Oliveira E (2024) Usability Analysis of a Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy Serious Game for Blood Phobia Treatment: Phobos Electronics 10.3390/electronics13071350 13 :7 (1350) Online publication date: 3-Apr-2024 https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13071350
• Sato Y (2024) PBL-Based Industry-Academia Game Development Education Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games 10.1007/978-3-031-23161-2_399 (1333-1340) Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23161-2_399
• Mihura López R Seoane Nolasco A Piñeiro Otero T (2023) introducción de los videojuegos en los contenidos museísticos HUMAN REVIEW. International Humanities Review / Revista Internacional de Humanidades 10.37467/revhuman.v19.4927 19 :4 (1-14) Online publication date: 8-Mar-2023 https://doi.org/10.37467/revhuman.v19.4927
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Game development software engineering process life cycle: a systematic review

• Saiqa Aleem   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3385-0613 1 ,
• Luiz Fernando Capretz 2 &
• Faheem Ahmed 3  

Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development volume  4 , Article number:  6 ( 2016 ) Cite this article

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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. Multidisciplinary nature of the game development processes that combine sound, art, control systems, artificial intelligence (AI), and human factors, makes the software game development practice different from traditional software development. However, the underline software engineering techniques help game development to achieve maintainability, flexibility, lower effort and cost, and better design. The purpose of this study is to assesses the state of the art research on the game development software engineering process and highlight areas that need further consideration by researchers. In the study, we used a systematic literature review methodology based on well-known digital libraries. The largest number of studies have been reported in the production phase of the game development software engineering process life cycle, followed by the pre-production phase. By contrast, the post-production phase has received much less research activity than the pre-production and production phases. The results of this study suggest that the game development software engineering process has many aspects that need further attention from researchers; that especially includes the postproduction phase.

1 Introduction

With the rapid advancement of computer technology, the significance of software engineering in our daily lives is increasing. It affects every aspect of our lives today, including working, living, learning, and education. A new and popular mode of entertainment and an important application of technology are software games, which have become increasingly accepted by people of all ages. In today’s culture, technology is easily accessible and has become more convenient; more and more people like to play games and are also becoming motivated to design their own games. Salen and Zimmerman ( 2003 ) defined “game is a software application in which one or more players make decisions by controlling game objects and resources, in the pursuit of its goal”. Software games are software applications that are installed on hardware devices such as video game consoles, computers, handheld devices, and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). Software games have now become a worldwide creative industry, but because of the multidisciplinary activities required, their development is a very complex task.

The multidisciplinary nature of the processes that combine sound, art, control systems, artificial intelligence (AI), and human factors, also makes the software game development practice different from traditional software development. However, despite the high complexity of the software engineering development process, the game industry is making billions of dollars in profit and creating many hours of fun (PWC, 2011–2014 outlook). The software game market throughout the world has grown by over 7–8 % annually and has reached sales of around $5.5 billion in 2015 (SUPERDATA 2015 ). Newzoo Game Market ( 2015 ) has also reported that the world-wide digital game market will reach $113.3 billion by 2018.

Creation of any game involves cross-functional teams including designers, software developers, musicians, script writers, and many others. Also, Entertainment Software Association (ESA) ( 2014 ); 2015 ) reports highlighted the latest trends about the software game industry. Therefore, game development careers have currently become highly challenging, dynamic, creative, and profitable (Liming and Vilorio, 2011 ). The ability to handle complex development tasks and achieve profitability does not happen by chance, but rather a common set of good practices must be adopted to achieve these goals. The game industry can follow the good and proven practices of traditional software engineering, but only a clear understanding of these practices can enhance the complex game development engineering process.

The computer game domain covers a great variety of player modes and genres (Gredler, 1995 ; Gredler, 2003 ; Rieber, 2005 ). The complexity of software games has posed many challenges and issues in software development engineering process because it involves diverse activities in creative arts disciplines (storyboarding, design, refinement of animations, artificial intelligence, video production, scenarios, sounds, marketing, and, finally, sales) in addition to technological and functional requirements (Keith, 2010 ). This inherent diversity leads to a greatly fragmented domain from the perspectives of both underlying theory and design methodology. The software game literature published in recent years has focused mainly on technical issues. Issues of game production, development, and testing reflect only the general software-engineering state of the art. Pressman ( 2001 ) states that a game is a kind of software that entertains its users, but game development software engineering faces many challenges and issues if only a traditional software-development process is followed (Kanode and Haddad, 2009 ; Petrillo et al., 2009 ). Some studies have proposed a Game Development Software Engineering (GDSE) process life cycle that provides guidelines for the game development software engineering process (Hendrick, 2014 ; Blitz game studio, 2014 ; McGrath, 2014 ; Chandler, 2010 ; Ramadan and Widyani 2013 ). However, the proposed GDSE process life cycle development phases do not ensure a quality development process.

A GDSE process is different from a traditional software development engineering process, and all phases of the proposed GDSE process life cycle can be combined into three main phases: pre-production, production, and post-production. The pre-production phase includes testing the feasibility of target game scenarios, including requirements engineering marketing strategies; the production phase involves planning, documentation, and game implementation scenarios with sound and graphics. The last phase post-production involves testing, marketing, and game advertising. Because of high competition and extreme market demand, game development companies sometimes reduce their development process so they can be first to market (Kaitilla, 2014 ). This reduction of the development process definitely affects game quality. Because of these types of complex project-management tasks, the game development software engineering process diverges from traditional software development. Therefore, it becomes important now to investigate the challenges or issues faced by game development organizations in developing good quality games. This systematic literature review is the first step towards identifying the research gaps in the GDSE field.

1.1 Related work

Managing GDSE process life cycle has become a much harder process than anyone could have initially imagined, and because of the fragmented domain, no clear picture of its advancement can be found in the literature. A systematic literature review provides a state of the art examination of an area and raises open research questions in a field, thus saving a great deal of time for those starting research in the field. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no systematic literature review has been reported for GDSE process life cycle. Many researchers have adopted the systematic literature review approach to explore different aspects in software games. Boyle et al. ( 2012 ) conducted a systematic literature review to explore the engagement factor in entertainment games from a player’s perspective. In this study, 55 papers were selected to perform the systematic literature review. The study highlighted the different aspects of engagement factors with entertainment games; these include subjective feelings of enjoyment, physiological responses, motives, game usage, player loyalty, and the impact of playing games on a player’s life. Connolly et al. ( 2012 ) explored 129 papers to report the impacts and outcomes of computer and serious games with respect to engagement and learning by using the systematic literature review approach.

Another study also reported the importance of engagement in digital games by using a systematic literature review approach. Osborne-O’Hagan et al. ( 2014 ) performed a systematic literature review on software development processes for games. A total of 404 studies were analyzed from industry and academia and different software development adoption models used for game development were discussed. The findings of the study were that qualitative studies reported more agile practices than the hybrid approach. The quantitative studies used an almost hybrid approach. We also noted that lightweight agile practices such as Scrum, XP, and Kanban – are suitable where innovation and time to market is important. A risk-driven spiral approach is appropriate for large projects. Only one systematic study was performed related to research on software engineering practices in the computer game domain rather than GDSE process life cycle (Ampatzoglou and Stamelos 2010 ).

This study mainly review the existing evidence in the literature concerning the GDSE process research and suggest areas for further investigation by identifying possible gaps in current research. Furthermore, the aim of this study is to cover the state of the art for the GDSE process life cycle, and to accomplish this, an evidence-based research paradigm has been used. In the software engineering field, possible use of an evidence-based paradigm have been proposed by Dyba et al. ( 2005 ) and Kitchenham et al. (2004). The Systematic Literature Review (SLR) research paradigm constitutes the first step in an evidence-based paradigm research process, and its guidelines for performing systematic research are thoroughly described by Brereton et al. ( 2007 ) and Kitchenham ( 2004 ).

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides the research background and Section 3 describes the methodology used for the systematic literature review as described by Breton et al. (2007). Section 4 presents the statistics for the primary studies, Section 5 answers various research questions, Section 6 discuss the external threats to validity, and, finally, Section 7 concludes the presentation.

2 Background

In the software development industry, software games are gaining importance because they are not only used for entertainment, but also for serious purposes that can be applicable to different domains such as education, business, and health care. Serious games are designed to have an impact on the target audience similar to entertainment games but they are combined seemingly with a practical dimension too. Both have to be attractive and appealing to a broad target audience (Alvarez & Michaud, 2008 ). Especially for serious games, along with their applicability to different domains, their revenue has also been increasing. Games software earned three times more revenue than any other software product in 2012 (Nayak, 2013 ).

Robin ( 2009 ) defines a development method as a systematized procedure to achieve the goal of producing a working product within budget and on schedule. A number of methodologies used for game development and design (Castillo 2008 ). The first is the waterfall method, which is also commonly used in traditional software development. Unlike game projects, once the pre-production phase is completed, production phase activities are performed in a “waterfall” manner. First, the activities are segregated based on functionalities and assets, and then they are assigned to their respective teams. The requirements team spent a significant amount of time in functionality definition and front-end activities, which implies a late implementation of level and mechanisms (Schwaber & Beedle, 2002 ). However, in the waterfall method, it is difficult to reverse any activity (Flood, 2003 ).

The second development methodology is the agile method that is commonly used for game development. These methods are highly iterative and not documentation-centric. The production phase is divided into small iterations and focusses on the most crucial features. During the beginning phase of each iteration, the whole team meets and sets clear objectives. At the end of each iteration, results are communicated to clients. These methods support different team cycles and dynamics through daily meetings. The most used agile methodologies in game development are extreme programming (XP), rapid prototyping, and Scrum (Godoy & Barbosa, 2010 ).

The unified development process (Kruchten, 2000 ) is another traditional SE method, which focusses more on analyzing requirements and converting them into functional software components. The requirement analysis document includes a definition of the game concept, use cases, and assets definitions (Schwaber & Beedle, 2002 ). The method includes five disciplines: requirements, analysis, design, implementation, and testing. The unified process is based on a philosophy of four key elements: iterative and incremental, use case-driven, architecture-centric, and risk-driven.

Kanode and Haddad ( 2009 ) stated that an important, but incorrect, assumption was made that GDSE follows the waterfall method. More recently, researchers have agreed that it must follow the incremental model (Munassar and Govardhan 2010 ) because it combines the waterfall method with an iterative process. A major concern, reported by Petrillo et al. ( 2009 ), was that very poor development methodologies are commonly used by developers for software creation in the game industry. The GDSE appears as a question in many forms attempting to determine what types of practices are used. However, there is no single answer to this question. Few researchers have explored GDSE practices and then tried to answer questions like the phases of the GDSE process life cycle. Blitz game studios ( 2014 ) proposed six phases for the GDSE process life cycle: Pitch (initial design and game concept), Pre-production (game design document), Main production (implementation of game concepts), Alpha (internal testers), Beta (third-party testers), and the Master phase (game launch). Hendrick ( 2014 ) proposed a five-phase GDSE process life cycle consisting of Prototype (initial design prototype), Pre-production (design document), Production (asset creation, source code, integration aspects), Beta (user feedback), and, finally, the Live phase (ready to play). McGrath ( 2014 ) divided the GDSE process life cycle into six phases: Design (initial design and game design document), Develop/redevelop (game engine development), Evaluate (if not passed, then redevelop), Test (internal testing), Review release (third-party testing), and Release (game launch). Another GDSE process life cycle proposed by Chandler ( 2010 ) consisted of four phases: Pre-production (design document and project planning), Production (technical and artistic), Testing (bug fixing), and, finally, the Post-production phase (post-mortem activities). The latest GDSE process life cycle in 2013 proposed by Ramadan and Widyani ( 2013 ) was based on the four GDSE process life cycles previously described. They proposed six phases: Initiation (rough concept), Pre-production (creation of game design and prototype), Production (formal details, refinement, implementation), Testing (bug reports, refinement testing, change requests), Beta (third-party testers), and Release (public release).

In traditional software engineering, the development phase usually involves activities such as application design and its implementation; the production phase is when the software actually runs and is ready for use. However, in the GDSE process lifecycle, the production phase includes the development process, which is the pre-production phase of the traditional software engineering process, and the production phase of traditional software engineering is actually the post-production phase of the GDSE process life cycle (Bethke, 2003 ). Therefore, the GDSE process life cycle is different from the traditional software engineering process, and many researchers have studied the challenges faced by this domain (Kanode and Haddad, 2009 ). The most prominent observation made in these studies is that to address the challenges faced by the GDSE process life cycle, more rigorous software engineering strategies must be used. Most researchers have explicitly compared the software engineering process with the GDSE process, but none of them has studied complete GDSE process life cycle and research topics under this domain in detail. This study will provide evidence on these topics and their differences from the traditional software engineering process. In this paper, the GDSE process phases were divided into three phases for basic understanding: Preproduction, Production, and Post-production. Efforts were made to classify these further based on studies found in the literature. The primary contribution of this paper is that it is the first SLR that addresses these GDSE process life cycle research topics and highlights the topics that need further attention by researchers.

In this work, the conceptual description of the SLR process presented by Kitchenham ( 2004 ) was used to investigate the research intensity for each phase of the GDSE process life cycle. Conceptually, SLR provides an opportunity for researchers to collect empirical evidence from the existing literature about a formulated research question. Although most authors followed the general SLR guidelines provided by Kitchenham ( 2004 ), there were slight variations in the description and presentation of the conceptual process layout. The generic SLR guidelines stated by Kitchenham ( 2004 ) are further elaborated here, and the overall process is described as a set of activities The research process has been adopted for this study described by Kitchenham and Charters ( 2007 ). There are mainly three phases of the review and the steps associated with each phase are shown in Fig.  1 .

3.1 Planning phase (Step 1–4)

This study started by selecting a topic, at which point the study objectives were also clearly defined and the boundaries of the domain delineated.

3.1.1 Selection of topic and research questions

Selecting a topic for SLR is of crucial importance because many factors such as individual or community interest, research gaps, and research impact contribute to shaping research questions on the topic. Our understanding of the GDSE process life cycle is continuously evolving (Kitchenham et al., 2010 ), and many areas in this field lack generalized evidence. It is critically important for the game industry to identify a quality-driven GDSE process. Several studies have investigated different phases of the GDSE process life cycle, but they do not offer systematic, comprehensive, and thorough methodological research specific to this topic.

In this review, studies from 2000 to 2015 will be explored to answer the following research questions:

Research Question (RQ1): What is the intensity of research activity on the GDSE process life cycle?

RQ2: What topics are being researched in the pre-production, production, and post-production phases?

RQ3: What research approaches are being used by researchers in the software game domain?

RQ4: What empirical research methods are being used in the software game domain?

The number of publications has been identified by the research group to address RQ1. A graphical representation has been used to represent the increase or decrease in the number of publications per year as a measure of research activity. To address RQ2, RQ3, and RQ4, each study selected has been affiliated to a research topic, to a certain approach, and to a specific methodology used for the research. Details of this classification into corresponding categories are discussed in section 3.2.4 .

3.1.2 Review team & protocol establishment

A multidisciplinary team is needed to perform a high-quality scientific SLR. To enhance the thoroughness and minimize the potential bias of a study, an SLR is normally undertaken by more than one reviewer. The SLR team for this review was made up of three people. Two people were designated as principal reviewers (Second expert report by American institute 2011). One person was also selected as the project leader to handle additional administrative tasks such as team communication, points of contact, meeting arrangements and documentation, task assignment and follow-up, and quality assurance. Table  1 details the tasks required for the SLR process and reviewer’s involvement and total time duration.

In order to ensure the review could be replicated and to reduce researcher bias a review protocol and it’s evaluation procedure was developed at step 3 and 4. The final review protocol is discussed in the following sections 3.2.1 to 3.2.4 (Steps 5–9 incl.).

3.2 Conducting phase (Step 5–9)

3.2.1 search strategy.

In the SLR, the search procedure is based on an online search. The search strategy for an SLR is a plan to construct search terms by identifying populations, interventions, and outcomes. Key terms are combined together to created different groups in order to form search strings. Each group comprise of terms that are either different forms of the same word, synonyms, or terms that have similar or related semantic meaning within the domain. Table  2 depicts the followed approach.

In order to retrieve different sets of relevant literature, four groups are designed. The main objective of this grouping is to find the literature that is the intersection of the groups as shown in Fig.  2 .

Selection of relevant studies

The search strategy was implemented by applying the “AND” and “OR”, where the “OR” operator is used within the Group and the “AND” is used between the groups. According to Table  2 , the following search string will capture the structure:

( Group 1: [Software game] OR [Digital game] OR [Video game] OR [Computer game] OR [Online Game] OR [Serious games] OR [Educational Games] OR [Learning Games])

( Group 2: [Development] OR [Advancement] OR [Steps] OR [Evolve] OR [Project])

( Group 3: [Life cycle] OR [Design] OR [Implementation] OR [Requirements Engineering] OR [Testing] OR [Evaluation] OR [Maintenance])

( Group 4: [Process] OR [Progression] OR [Method] OR [Model]).

Therefore, “ Software game development lifecycle process ”, “ Computer game development design process ” and “ video game testing process” are some examples of the search strings and similar way different search strings were formed in order to capture all relevant studies.”

To ensure that all relevant research concerning this area of study was reviewed, journals and conferences from 2000 to 2015 were covered, using as sources IEEE Explorer, ACM Digital Library, Science Direct Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Google Scholar, and Wiley Publications. If the information required, as indicated on the form shown in Table  3 , was not explicitly present in the potential study, then that paper was peer-reviewed by all team members and, after discussion, validated for correctness. Otherwise, each paper was reviewed by one reviewer. Each study involved some general information and some specific information, as indicated on the form.

3.2.2 Pilot selection & data extraction

The research study selection and data extraction was based on the following coverage criteria:

Inclusion criteria for study

For SLR, articles and research papers from 2000 to 2015 were included, and to evaluate their suitability, the following criteria were analyzed:

The study should be thoroughly reviewed by at least one of the reviewers.

Only the following types of studies were considered: case studies, theoretical papers, and empirical analysis surveys.

The full text of the article should be available.

If any article identifies any challenges and problems in software games, that article is included as a review.

Studies that describe motivation for game application.

Study exclusion criteria

The following criteria were used to determine articles to be excluded:

Articles published on company Web sites.

Articles not relevant to the research questions.

Articles not describing any phase of the game development life cycle.

Study selection

This procedure involved two phases. In the first phase, an initial selection was made on the basis of the inclusion criteria and after reading the title, abstract, and conclusion of each article. In the second phase, if a particular article met the criteria, then the whole article was studied. One hundred forty-eight papers were identified after final selection, as shown in Fig.  3 . Table  4 shows the results found in each data source and Additional file 1 : Appendix A contains a full list of selected publications.

Study selection process

3.2.3 Quality criteria

In this research, quality guidelines were defined based on a quality instrument that was used to assign a quality score to each article as a basis for data analysis and synthesis. The quality instrument consisted of four sections: a main section containing a generic checklist applicable to all studies, and three other sections specific to the type of study.

The checklist was based upon SLR guidelines (Kitchenham, 2004 ) and was derived from Kitchenham ( 2004 ) and Second expert report by American institute (2011). The detailed checklist is shown in Table  5 . Some of the checklist items could be answered by “yes” or “no” and they also included a “partial” option. A value of 1 was assigned to “yes,” 0 to “no,” and 0.5 to “partial”; then the sum of the checklist values was used to assign a quality score to the study to assess document quality.

3.2.4 Data synthesis

For data synthesis the topics, research approaches and methods are classified and their classification details are listed below:

Classification of topics in the GDSE Life Cycle

This section includes a classification of the topics covered by each study with respect to the pre-production, production, and post-production phase issues involved. The 2012 ACM classification system was used for classification, which is the same method used by Cai and Card ( 2008 ). The proposed classification system has been adopted by many journals and conferences specifically for software engineering topics. The same classification was used here to classify the papers under study, and these were further fabricated based on studies found in the GDLC domain. Table  6 presents the selected classification schema.

Research approaches and methods classification

Research articles can be characterized based on their method and approach, as described by Glass et al. ( 2002 ). The main categories for scientific approach are descriptive (a system, tool, or method; a literature review can also be considered as descriptive studies), exploratory (performed where a problem was not clearly defined), and empirical (findings based on observation of its subjects). To evaluate new methods or techniques, three major empirical research methods are used: surveys, case studies, and experiments (Wohlin et al., 2000 ). Table  7 describes the three major empirical research types; Dyba and Dingsoyr ( 2008 ) also used the same type of empirical classification.

The data collected were statistically analyzed as follows:

To address RQ1, the number of studies published per year, whether journal articles or conference publications, and the number of publications on the GDLC hosted by each digital library.

To address RQ2, the major topics of the GDLC that were investigated in the software game domain.

To address RQ3 and RQ4, the research approach or method used by number of studies.

From Section  3.2.4 , data were tabulated and are presented in Additional file 2 : Appendix B.

3.3 Documenting (Step 10–12)

This step of the SLR describe conclusion, possible threats and limitations to the validity of this study. Authors believe that there is a chance that the word game was not part of the title of some studies, but that nevertheless they discussed game development. These studies may, therefore, have been excluded from the primary dataset by the search procedure. There are other threats that are also linked to a systematic literature review such as generalization and subjective evaluation (Shadish et al., 2002 ).

There are limitations to our results, although significant amounts of effort and time was spent to select the papers that were studied. More specifically, our search was limited to the academic databases. It is obvious from the results of RQ1 that developers prefer to submit their work on the blogs or forums. However, posts for different game forums and blogs cannot be included in a systematic literature review because they don’t fulfil the quality criteria used for the selection of papers. In addition, the exclusion of less-known journals and conferences from the Web of Science and the Scopus index might have led to a different dataset.

Another limitation of the study is the exclusion of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) filed studies. In the phase of screening out, we found studies from HCI field such as (Plass-Oude Boss et al. ( 2010 )) for games but they didn’t focus on software engineering perspective. In short, we didn’t consider studies from HCI because they take non-functional requirements, and usability features into account. These methods help developers to evaluate software and they considered as an integral part of game development. However, due to the limited scope of the study, we excluded studies from HCI field.

Finally, the classification scheme might have altered the results if they were classified by a scheme, such as the waterfall model, instead of the ACM classification scheme. Despite these limitations, the results of our systematic literature review will be useful to game development organizations and developers of software games.

4 Results and Discussion

This section presents the results of statistical analysis of the data set discusses the findings concerning the RQs formulated in Section 3.1 . The characteristics of the data set are tabulated for better understanding. To trace the categories of each mapped study, the interested reader is referred to the Additional file 2 : Appendix B. A total 148 studies were collated and analyzed as part of this review. To identify GDSE process life cycle domain specific characteristics, the findings of this review will be compared to results from similar studies done by Cai and Card ( 2008 ), Glass et al. ( 2002 ), and Dyba and Dingsoyr ( 2008 ).

4.1 RQ1 What is the intensity of research activity on the GDSE process life cycle?

Table  8 clearly shows that GDSE process life cycle research intensity has increased during the last few years. Figure  4 showed an increase in GDSE process life cycle over time. The y -axis represents the number of publications in the form of a fraction and is calculated by taking year (i) ’s number of publications as the numerator and year (0) ’s number of publications as the denominator. From Table  8 , 2007 was taken as year (0) , and the first data point of the graph was calculated for year (1) i.e., 2008. Figure  4 shows the results up to 2015. Years are given on the x- axis.

Increase in GDSE process life cycle research activity

Figure  4 illustrates that during the last few years, research activity in the GDSE process life cycle domain has continuously increased and the number of publications in the GDSE domain has increased at a polynomial growth rate since 2005. During 2013, 2014 and 2015 the drop in research activity is noted. It seems obvious that most of the work related to GDSE research activity was not published on the selected sources for this study. During 2014, most of the research activities were seen on the game development associations/groups web sites, like DIGRA association and Gamastura, or game developers personal blogs.

Moreover, Fig.  5 shows the list of countries most active in GDSE process life cycle topics research. Looking at research activity based on countries, China now dominates GDSE process life cycle research, but its research into the game domain started only in 2010. In four years, China has come to dominate this area of research. Before 2010, the United States and the United Kingdom were dominant.

Research activity per country

Authors from North and South America have played a dominant role since 2004 and are still contributing in this area. Contributors in Europe also started research into the GDSE domain in 2007, but the Asian continent has dominated the GDSE domain since 2010. It can be visualized in Fig.  6 . The most popular venue for GDSE research publication is IEEE; it seems that IEEE accounts for the main bulk of publications (approximately 63 %), followed by Elsevier, Springer, and ACM.

Research activity by continent

4.2 RQ 2: What topics are being researched in the pre-production. Production and post production phase?

This section addresses the identification of main research topics in the GDSE process life cycle domain. Table  9 clearly suggests that most research has been conducted in the production phase, followed by the pre-production phase. On the other hand, the post-production phase has not attracted much research interest. These GDSE process life cycle topics are somewhat different than in software engineering because of two factors: first, the GDSE domain has special needs and priorities, and second, it is a young domain which requires more fundamental research in the area of requirements, development, and coding tools. When the GDSE domain becomes mature, then other areas in the field, like testing and verification, will attract the interest of researchers.

As mentioned earlier in Section 2 , games have specific characteristics, which the conventional software development process cannot completely address. In the past years, research on GDSE process life cycle topics has become more active because, unlike other software products, games provide entertainment and user enjoyment, and developers need to give more importance to these aspects. As a result, research about the pre-production phase has increased. The implementation phase is shorter than in the traditional software implementation process because of the short time to market. This production-phase research intensity has attracted the interest of many researchers, and maximum research activity has been reported because the GDSE domain requires efficient development and coding techniques. McShaffry ( 2003 ) also highlighted the importance of the production phase to counteract poor internal quality. There is much less research activity in the post-production phase than in the pre-production and production phases.

Figure  7 presents the growth of each GDSE process life cycle research topic since 2000. It is apparent that in the pre-production phase, the most researched topic is management of the game development process, followed in this order by production-phase development platforms, programming, and implementation topics. In the post-production phase, the marketing area attracted the largest amount of research interest. The state of the art research is the description of actual primary studies, and, therefore, they are mapped according to the research topics they addressed (Budgen et al., 2008 ). Next, a short description of each GDSE topic is presented along with a full reference list. A full reference list of all the studies included is presented in Additional file 1 : Appendix A.

GDSE process life cycle research topics

4.2.1 Pre-production phase

In the pre-production phase, most of the studies categorized under this topic address management issues during the GDSE process life cycle. The overall management of the game development process combines both an engineering process and creation of artistic assets. Ramadan and Widyani [S1] compared various game development strategies from a management perspective, and most studies like [S3], [S6], [S7], and [S8] have proposed frameworks for game development. Game development guidelines can be followed to manage GDSE process life cycle. The presence of agile practices in the game development processes is also highlighted by some studies. Tschang [S4] and Petrillo et al. [S17] highlighted the issues in the game development process and their differences from traditional software development practices. Management of development-team members and their interaction is critically important in this aspect.

Some studies [S10] and [S11] have provided data analytics and empirical analysis of the game development process and issues of interdisciplinary team involvement. Best management practices in the game development process must consider certain elements such as staying on budget, timing, and producing the desired output. To assess game quality, five usability and quality criteria (functional, internally complete, balanced, fun, and accessible) can be used, but a process maturity model specific to the game development process is still needed to measure these processes for better management and high performance.

Requirements specification

One of the main differences between the traditional software development process and GDSE process life cycle is the requirements phase. The game development process requires consideration of many factors such as emotion, game play, aesthetics, and immersive factors. In four studies, the authors have discussed the requirements engineering perspective to highlight its importance for the whole game-software development process. They discussed emotional factors, language ontology, elicitation, feedback, and emergence [S19], [S20], [S21], and [S22]. In particular, game developers must understand these basic non-functional requirements along with the game play requirements and incorporate them while developing games. The main challenges in requirements identification are a) communication between diverse background stakeholders, b) non-functional requirements incorporation with game play requirements, such as media and technology integration, and c) validation of non-functional requirement such as fun, which is very complex because it is totally dependent on the target audience. Callele et al. [S20] further fabricated a set of requirements based on emotional criteria, game-playing criteria (cognitive factors and mechanics), and sensory requirements (visual, auditory, and haptic). The requirements specification phase must address both the functional and non-functional requirements of game development.

Game system description language

Many description languages are currently used by developers, such as the UML model, agent-based methodologies, and soft-system methodologies. Quanyin et al. [S32] proposed the UML model for mobile games. They performed experiments and reported that it would be a good model for further development of games on the Android operating system. Shaker et al. [S33] extracted features of the Super Mario Brothers game from different levels, frequency sequences of level elements, and statistical design levels. Then, they analyzed the relationship between a player’s experience and the level design parameters of platform games using feature analysis modelling. Tylor et al. [S28] proposed a soft system methodology for initial identification of game concepts in the development process. The proposed approach can be used instead of a popular description language because it provides an overview of the game. Chan and Yuen [S30] and Rodriguez et al. [S31] proposed an ontology knowledge framework for digital game development and serious games modelling using the AOSE methodology. A system description language for games must be both intelligible to human beings and formal enough to support comparison and analysis of players and system behaviors. In addition, it must be production-independent, adequately describe the overall game process, and provide clear guidelines for developers.

Reusability

The existence of reusability of software (Capretz and Lee 1992 ) and development platforms in game development has been reported by some researchers, but to gain its full advantages, commonality and variability analysis must be done in the pre-production phase. This category addresses reuse techniques for game development software (Ahmed and Capretz, 2011 ). Neto et al. [S34] performed a survey that analyzed game development software reuse techniques and their similarity to software product lines. Reuse techniques in game development could reduce cost and time and improve quality and productivity. For reuse techniques, commonality and variability analysis is very important, similar to a software product line. Szegletes and Forstner [S36] proposed a reusable framework for adaptive game development. The architecture of the proposed framework consisted of loosely coupled components for better flexibility. They tested their framework by developing educational games. The requirements of the new game must be well aligned with the reusable components of the previously developed game.

Game design document

The Game Design Document (GDD) is an important deliverable in the pre-production phase. It consists of a coherent description of the basic components, their interrelationships, directions, and a shared vocabulary for efficient development. Westera et al. [S37] addressed the issue of design complexity in serious games by proposing a design framework. Furthermore, Salazar et al. [S38] highlighted the importance of a game design document for game development and provided an analysis of many available game design documents from the literature. They also compared their findings with traditional software requirement specifications and concluded that a poor game design document can lead to poor-quality product, rework, and financial losses in the production and post-production phases. Hsu et al. [S40] pointed out the issues of level determination in games and trade-off decisions about them. They proposed an approach to solve the trade-off decision problem, which is based on a neural network technique and uses a genetic algorithm to perform design optimization. Khanal et al. [S41] presented design research for serious games for mobile platforms, and Cheng et al. [S42] provided design research for integrating GIS spatial query information into serious games. Finally, Ibrahim and Jaafar [S43] and Tang and Hanneghan [S44] worked on a game content model for game design documents. Currently, GDD suffers from formalism and incomplete representation; to address this issue, the formal development of GDD is very important. A comprehensive GDD (focused on the game’s basic design and premises) results in good game quality.

Game prototyping

Game prototyping in the pre-production phase helps the developer to clarify the fundamental mechanics of the final game. Game prototyping in the preproduction phases is considered important because it is used to convey game and play mechanics and also helps in evaluating a game player’s experience. Reyno and Cubel [S49] proposed automatic prototyping for game development based on a model-driven approach. An automatic transformation generates the software prototype code in C++. De Silva et al. [S48] proposed community-driven game prototyping. The developer can approach the well-established community and focus on the technical stuff rather than starting from scratch. They used this approach for massive, multi-player online game development. Guo et al. [S50], Kanev and Sugiyam [S51], and Piesoto et al. [S52] proposed analysis of rapid prototyping for Pranndo’s history-dependent games, 3D interactive computer games, and game development frameworks respectively. Prototypes also help to identify missing functionality, after which developers can easily incorporate quick design changes. Model-driven or rapid-prototyping approaches can be used to develop game prototypes.

Design tools

Game design tools are used to help game developers create descriptions of effects and game events in detail without high-level programming skills. Cho and Lee [S56] and Segundo et al. [S57] proposed an event design tool for rapid game development and claimed that it does not require any kind of programming skill. These tools also enable reuse of existing components and reduce the total time of the game-creation process.

Risk management

In the game development domain, risk management factors do not receive much discussion by researchers. Risk management is very important from a project management point of view. Identifying risk factors in the game development process is also important. In game development, the project manager is the game producer and must bring together management, technical, and aesthetic aspects to create a successful game. The study by Schmalz et al. [S58] is the only study highlighting the issue of risk management in video development projects. They identified two risk factors during the development process: failure of development strategy and absence of the fun factor. In game development, important risk factors can be the development strategy, the fun factor or extent of originality, scheduling, budgeting, and others, but very low priority has been given by game developers to formal analysis of risk factors.

4.2.2 Production phase

Asset creation.

Asset creation in the production phase is the foundation stage where game developers create the various assets and then use them in the game implementation phase. In the production phase, the first step is to create assets for the game. One of these assets is audio creation. Migneco et al. [S63] developed an audio-processing library for game development in Flash. It includes common audio-processing routines and sound-interaction Web games. Minovic et al. [S65] proposed an approach based on the model drive method for user interface development, and Pour et al. [S64] presented a brain computer interface technology that can control a game on a mobile device using EEG Mu rhythms. For audio processing, open-source libraries are available, especially for games. Audio and interface design are examples of game assets.

Storyboard production

Storyboard production is the most important phase of game production; it involves development of game scenarios for level solutions and incorporation of artificial intelligence planning techniques for representing the various features of games through a traditional white board or flow chart. Pizzi et al. [S59] proposed a rational approach that elaborated game-level scenario solutions using knowledge representation and also incorporated AI techniques to explore alternative solutions by direct interaction with generated storyboards. Finally, Anderson [S61] presented a classification of scripting systems for serious and entertainment games, and Cai and Chen [S62] explored scene editor software for game scenes. Their approach was based on the OGRE.Net framework and C++ technology. Various scripting editors based on different technologies are available for game developers to produce storyboards. Some of this software helps to develop and edit scenes at different game levels, and other software helps by generating game levels automatically based on a description.

Development platforms

The studies classified under this category proposed various types of platforms for game development. Development platforms provide a ready-made architecture for server–client connectivity and help developers create games quickly. Open-source development platforms are available, but developers must customize them according to the required functionality. Peres et al. [S69] used a scrum methodology for game development, especially for multiple platforms, and implemented interfaces with social networking Web sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Jieyi et al. [S70] proposed a platform for quick development of mobile 3D games. First, the platform implemented the game template in two environments such as the Nokia series 60 platform and the Symbian OS. The second part of the process involved analysis of the entire game structure and extraction of game parameters for later customization. Finally, the tool could be used for game customization. Lin et al. [S] developed intelligent multimedia mobile games from embedded platforms. The proposed communication protocol was able to control the embedded platform to achieve the game usability and amusement. Mao et al. [S78] presented a logical animation platform for game design and development, and Alers and Barakova [S81] developed a multi-agent platform for an educational children’s game. Suomela et al. [S77] highlighted the important aspects of multi-user application platforms used for rapid game development. Some researchers have proposed a development platform similar to that described above that provides connectivity along with client customization and unnecessary updating of game servers.

Formal language description

Game semantics can be classified under formal language description for programming languages; only two studies were reported under this classification. The formal language description of game semantics provided a way to gain insight into the design of programming languages for game development. Mellies [S99] proposed a denotational prepositional linear logic for asynchronous games, and Calderon and McCusker [S100] presented their analysis of game semantics using coherence spaces. Very little work has been reported in this area, and very few game semantic descriptions of languages have been published.

Programming

Code complexity is increasing, especially in game development, because of the incorporation of complex modules, AI techniques, and a variety of behaviors. The most common programming languages used in game development are object-oriented structured languages such as Java, C, and C++. Studies classified under this category explored the programming aspect of game development. El Rhalibi et al. [S82] proposed a development environment based on Java Web Start and JXTA P2P technologies called Homura and NetHomura. It extends the JME game engine by facilitating content libraries, providing a new interface, and also providing a software suite that supports advanced graphical functionalities within IDE. The other two studies, done by Meng et al. [S84] and Chen and Xu [S85], also explored programming languages such as C++, DirectX, and Web GL and also Web Socket technologies for game development. Three studies by Yang et al. [S87], Yang and Zhang [S88], and Wang and Lu [S89] explored collision detection algorithms from a game logic aspect for software games, proposed A* search, and AI optimization-based algorithms.

Wang et al. [S83] proposed a framework for developing games based on J2ME technology. Zhang et al. [S92] also explored the effects of object-oriented technology on performance, executable file size, and optimization techniques for mobile games and suggested that object-oriented technology should be used with great care because the structured programming in game development is highly competitive. Bartish and Thevathayan [S86] and Fahy and Krewer [S90] analyzed the use of agents, finite state machines, and open-source libraries for the overwhelmingly complex process of multi-platform game development. Optimization techniques can be used with object-oriented programming to avoid unnecessarily redundant classes and inheritance, and to handle performance bottlenecks. These languages can be used across different development environments such as Android, iOS, Windows, and Linux. Researchers have proposed various approaches and tools for efficient game development. The integration of various development artefacts into games can also be done by generative programming, which also helps to achieve efficient development.

Game engine

A game engine is a kind of special software framework that is used in the production phase for creating and developing games. Game engines consist mainly of a combination of core functionalities such as sound, a physics engine or collision detection, AI, scripting, animation, networking, memory management, and scene graphs. Hudlicka [S108] identified a set of requirements for a game engine, including identification of the player’s emotions and the social interactions among game characters. This is the only study that has highlighted the important functionalities that an affective game engine must support. Another study by Wu et al. [S109] focused on game script engine development based on J2ME. It divided script engines into two types. The first type is the high-level script engine that includes packaging and refining of the script engine. The second type, the low-level script engine includes feature packages associated only with API. Four studies [S102], [S105], [S106], and [S107] explored the development of game engines on mobile platforms. Finally, Anderson et al. [S109] proposed a game engine selection tool. Recently, developers have been using previously developed or open-source game engines to economize on the game development process. Various researchers have proposed script-based, design pattern-based, and customizable game engines. In the GDSE process life cycle, game engines automate the game creation process and help a developer to develop a game in a shorter time.

Implementation

The foundations of game theory are used in game development because it is a branch of decision theory that describes interdependent decisions. Most studies in this category described different aspects of game implementation technologies on various types of platforms. They considered improving programming skills, 2D/3D animations and graphics, sound engineering, project management, logic design, story-writing interface design, and AI techniques. Various kinds of game implementation technologies can be found in the literature. Vanhatupa [S117] presented a survey of implementation technologies especially for browser games. The technologies explored in these studies are mainly server applications (application runtime, server-side scripting, and user interface and communication), client applications, databases, and architecture. The same study also described the accessories that can be used for implementation: application platforms, game engines, and various types of plug-ins. Abd El-Sattar [S112] proposed an interactive computer-based game framework for the implementation process. The framework includes steps from design through implementation that are based on game theory foundations and focus mainly on game models, Nash equilibrium, and strategies of play. The proposed framework includes architectural design and specifications, a proposed game overview, a game start-up interface and difficulty scaling, game modelling, the game environment and player control, and a free-style combat system.

Four studies [S113], [S114], [S119] and [S120] focused mainly on a development framework for mobile devices. Su et al. [S96] proposed a framework describing implementation of various main modules such as pressure movement, a thread pool based on the I/O completion port, and a message module. They also claimed that their proposed framework addressed the problems of traditional frameworks such as the single-server exhaustion problem, synchronization, and thread-pooling issues. Jhingut et al. [S114] discussed 3D mobile game implementation technologies from both single-player and multi-player perspectives. They also evaluated two game APIs: MDP 2.0 and M3G API. Finally, Kao et al. [S120] proposed a client framework for mobile devices that used a message-based communication protocol and reserved platform-specific data as much as possible. A few researchers have proposed agent-based frameworks as explored above for effective communication and synchronization between system components.

4.2.3 Post-production phase

Quality assurance.

Process validation plays an important role in assessing game quality. Collection and evaluation of process data from the pre-production phase through to the post-production phase either provide evidence that the overall development process produces a good-quality game as a final product or reveal that it cannot. Only two studies were reported under this classification. Stacey et al. [S122] used a story-telling strategy to assess the game development process. They carried out a two-year case study on a four-person development team. Astrachan et al. [S126] tried to validate the game creation process by analyzing the development process and design decisions made during development. The scope of studies done under this category was limited. The case studies were done for small teams and were limited to only one phase. In the game development process, quality assurance and process validation are critical components, and standard methodologies are lacking. More exploration is needed to provide deeper insights. QA for games needs more research attention because very little work has been reported.

Beta testing

Beta testing in games is used to evaluate overall game functionality using external testers. Beta testing is a kind of first public release for testing purposes by users. Game publishers often find it effective because bugs are identified by users that were missed by developers. If any desired functionality is missing, it must be addressed at this stage. This testing is performed before final game release. Under this classification, only four studies [S127], [S128], [S129], and [S130] were reported. Hable and Platzer [S129] evaluated their proposed development framework for mobile game platforms. Omar et al. [S128] evaluated educational computer games and identified two evaluation techniques: Playability Heuristic for Educational Games (PHEG) for expert evaluators, and Playability Assessment of Educational Games (PAEG) for real-world users. The proposed AHP-based Holistic Online Evaluation System for Educational Computer Games (AHP_HeGES) online evaluation tool can be used in the evaluation process. Very little work was reported in this category.

Heuristic-based testing

Heuristics are a kind of design guideline and can be used as an evaluation tool by game design developers or users. Basically, heuristics can be used in software engineering to test the interface. In games, evaluation must extend beyond the interface because other playability experiences also need evaluation such as the game story, play, and mechanics. Six studies [S132], [S133], [S134], [S146], [S147], and [S148] fell under this classification. Al-Azawi et al. [S132] proposed a heuristic testing-based framework for game development. The proposed framework divides testing by two types of user: experts and real-world users. Experts evaluate playability, game usability, and game quality factors. Users evaluate the game as a positive or negative experience. Omar and Jaafar [S133] and Al-Azawi et al. [S134] proposed a framework for the evaluation phase in the game development process. Heuristic testing can be done during the development process and repeated from the early design phase. It is perfect for game testing because after the game is implemented, if anything goes wrong, it will be too expensive to fix and will affect the project schedule. This topic also needs attention by researchers.

Empirical testing

Empirical testing approaches for the game-testing phase have been explored by only a few researchers. The approaches described by these researchers have focused only on final-product quality and usability. Only two studies were reported under this classification [S135] and [S136]. Escudeiro and Escudeiro [S135] used a Quantitative Evaluation Framework (QEF) to evaluate serious mobile games and reported that QEF frameworks are very important in validating educational games and final-product quality. Choi [S136] analyzed the effectiveness of usability-expert evaluation and testing for game development. Experimental results showed the importance of the validation process in game development. The scope of the studies done under this category was very limited, and other aspects of final-product testing have not been explored by researchers.

Testing tools

Development of testing tools has not been addressed by many researchers. Only one study [S137] was reported under this classification. Cho et al. [S137] proposed testing tools for black-box and scenario-based testing. They used their tool on several online games to verify its effectiveness. Tools for game testing facilitate the testing process. The proposed scope of study was also limited, and available testing tools have focused only on evaluation of online games.

After a game has been developed, the final step is marketing. Marketing of games includes a marketing strategy and a marketing plan. The marketing strategy is directly related to the choice of users and the types of games that are in demand. The marketing plan is something that a publisher can give to a distributor to execute on the publisher’s behalf. Some studies have been done from the perspective of game-user satisfaction that provide the baseline for the factors that game developers must take into account for new game development. Yee et al. [S142] described a game motivation scale based on a three-factor model that can be used to assess game trends. Three studies [S139], [S143], and [S144] empirically investigated the perspective of game-user satisfaction and loyalty. No study in the literature has directly captured a marketing strategy and a marketing plan for games.

4.3 RQ 3: What research approaches are being used by researchers in digital game domain?

Table  10 shows that most GDSE process life cycle studies have used an exploratory research approach. Figure  8 shows a comparison between the three research approaches used in the GDSE process life cycle domain. Figure  9 shows a comparison among the empirical research methods used in the GDSE process life cycle domain. The results suggest that surveys are most frequently used in GDSE domain research.

GDSE process life cycle research approaches

Empirical research approaches

These results were to be expected because the GDSE domain has only been growing since 2005; before 2010 more studies follow the descriptive approach because the field was young. After 2010, more studies have followed the exploratory approach because the domain has been maturing. More specifically, exploratory and descriptive approaches seem now to be equally used in the GDSE process life cycle domain.

4.4 RQ4: What empirical research methods are being used in the software games domain?

Table  11 depicts the results of the RQ4. The experimental empirical method is less used in the GDSE process life cycle domain, as mentioned by Wohlin et al. ( 2000 ), because carrying out formal experiments requires significant experience. The case-study method has also been used infrequently by researchers. The reason for this could be that case studies require project data obtained through various types of observations or measurements, and no research database or repository is available for the GDSE process life cycle domain. Finally, the survey method was more common than the other two methods. This is reasonable because the GDSE domain is still immature and researchers are trying to produce knowledge by questioning game users, experts, and others.

5 Conclusions

The GDSE process proved to be incredibly challenging as game technology including game platforms and engines changes rapidly and coding modules are used very rarely in the another game project. However, recent success of digital game industry enforces further stress along with game development challenges and highlights the need of good practices adoption for game development process. In order to find out the specific area in game development software engineering process for improvement, assessment of process activities needs to be performed. However, due to relatively young history and empirical nature of the field, there has not been any development strategies or set of best practices to carry out game development fully explored. This systematic literature review helps to identify the research gaps in game development life cycle.

The main objective of this research was to provide an insight into the GDSE process life cycle domain because, in the past, researchers have pointed out that it is different from the traditional software development process. To achieve this objective, a systematic literature review was performed, which confirmed the first step of the evidence-based paradigm. The results also confirmed that the GDSE process life cycle domain is different from the traditional software engineering development process and that research activity is growing day by day, attracting the interest of more researchers. This observation provided an evidence for developers they need to look for other important activities on top of software development process. This paper describes the various topics in the GDSE domain and highlights the main research activities related to the GDSE process life cycle. The research topics identified in the GDSE were a combination of different disciplines and together they complete the game development process.

The most heavily researched topics were from the production phase, followed by the pre-production phase. On the other hand, in the post-production phase, less research activity was reported. In the pre-production phase, the management topic accounted for the most publications, whereas in the production phase, the development platform, programming, and the implementation phase attracted the most researchers. The production phase has attracted more research because game developers focus more on implementation and programming because of the limited game-development time period. The post-production phase includes process validation, testing, and marketing topics. Very little research activity was observed in this area because the quality aspect of game development is not yet a mature field. These results highlighted that researcher’s need to pay attention especially in the phase of post-production.

In addition to research topics, more researchers used exploratory research methods; as for empirical research methods, surveys were carried out by more researchers than case studies and experiments. Overall, the findings of this study are important for the development of good-quality digital games. Rapid and continual changes in technology and intense competition not only affect the business, but also have a great impact on development activities. To deal with this strong competition and high pressure, game development organizations and game developers must continually assess their activities and adopt an appropriate evaluation methodology. The result of the study highlighted that use of a proper assessment methodology will help the organization identify its strengths and weaknesses and provide guidance for improvement. However, the fragmented nature of the GDSE process requires a comprehensive evaluation strategy, which has not yet been entirely explored. Finally, this kind of research work provides a baseline for other studies in the GDSE process life cycle domain and highlights research topics that need more attention in this area. The findings of this study will help researchers to identify research gaps in GDSE process life cycle and highlights areas for further research contributions. This study also is a part of a larger project aiming to propose a digital game maturity assessment model (Aleem et al. 2016a ). The identified important dimensions are developer’s perspective (Aleem et al. 2016b ), the consumer, the business (Aleem et al. 2016c ), and the process itself. It also reinforces the assertion that the GDSE process life cycle domain is a complex scientific domain comparable to the software engineering development process, and it needs more attention and consideration of different factors in game development software engineering process.

In short, this study presents a systematic literature review of the GDLC topics. Overall, the findings of this study are important for the development of good-quality digital games because they highlight the areas that needs research attention. The results of this study have shown that the fragmented nature of the GDLC process requires a comprehensive evaluation strategy, which has not yet been entirely explored. Finally, this kind of research work provides a baseline for other studies in the GDLC domain and highlights research topics that need more attention in this area. The findings of this study will also help researchers to identify research gaps in the GDLC and highlight areas for further research contributions.

Abbreviations

Game Design Document

Game Development Software Engineering (GDSE)

Quantitative Evaluation Framework

Systematic Literature Review

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Authors’ contributions

SA designed the study and performed the review methodology, collected the data, analyzed the data and drafted the manuscript. LC helped to conceive the study and provided guidance to carry out the quality assessments of paper, reviewed the drafted manuscript and fine-tune the final draft. FA helped in study design, provided guidance to present the analysis and helped to draft the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Saiqa Aleem

Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, N6A 5B9, Canada

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Aleem, S., Capretz, L.F. & Ahmed, F. Game development software engineering process life cycle: a systematic review. J Softw Eng Res Dev 4 , 6 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40411-016-0032-7

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