Software Engineering Processes in Game Development: a Survey about Brazilian Developers' Experiences
With the increasing participation of digital games in the economy and our society, the attention given to this subject in the academic field has also increased. However, the software engineering field and, more precisely, game development processes seems to be forgotten by researchers. In addition, game developers and big game companies prefer to keep their processes and methodologies to themselves. Studies and professional reports have shown the “ugly face” behind the game industry. Crunch Times and heavy pressure during the development are treated as normal practices in a game developer’s life. In this work, we surveyed 58 Brazilian game developers about the relations between game development process and problems in a software engineering context. We sought for answers based on empirical data collected from the questionnaire. The goal was to understand the area and provide insights to improve game development, pointing a direction for future researches. As a result, considering the Brazilian context, this paper presents three main contributions. The first shows that, on projects that used systematic approaches, regardless of the type, result in better products. The second presents that Delays, Unrealistic scope and Lack of documentation are the most common problems faced by game developers. Finally, we describe insights and considerations gathered from developers and literature studies, which may serve as a source of knowledge as well as characterization of the Brazilian game developers.
@inproceedings{Politowski2016,
title={Software Engineering Processes in Game Development: a Survey about Brazilian Developers' Experiences},
author={Politowski, Cristiano and De Vargas, Daniel and Fontoura, Lisandra M and Foletto, Ant{\^o}nio A},
booktitle={Proceedings of the XIV Brazilian Symposium on Computer Games and Digital Entertainment (SBGames)},
year={2016}
}