Dataset of Video Game Development Problems

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive, manually curated dataset of 1,035 software engineering problems extracted from over 200 video game development postmortems spanning 20 years, aiding research and practice.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, grounded dataset of video game development problems, systematically extracted and categorized from postmortems, filling a gap in software engineering research for this domain.

Findings

Dataset includes 1,035 problems categorized into 20 types.

Problems span 20 years of video game development history.

Provides a resource for studying software engineering challenges in gaming.

Abstract

Different from traditional software development, there is little information about the software-engineering process and techniques in video-game development. One popular way to share knowledge among the video-game developers' community is the publishing of postmortems, which are documents summarizing what happened during the video-game development project. However, these documents are written without formal structure and often providing disparate information. Through this paper, we provide developers and researchers with grounded dataset describing software-engineering problems in video-game development extracted from postmortems. We created the dataset using an iterative method through which we manually coded more than 200 postmortems spanning 20 years (1998 to 2018) and extracted 1,035 problems related to software engineering while maintaining traceability links to the postmortems. We grouped the problems in 20 different types. This dataset is useful to understand the problems faced by developers during video-game development, providing researchers and practitioners a starting point to study video-game development in the context of software engineering.