A Catalogue of Game-Specific Software Nuggets

TL;DR

This paper introduces a catalogue of ten game-specific software bad practices, called G-Nuggets, identified through mining and analyzing open-source game repositories to help improve game development quality.

Contribution

The paper presents the first comprehensive catalogue of game-specific software Nuggets, derived from empirical analysis of real-world open-source game projects.

Findings

Identified ten G-Nuggets affecting game software quality.

Developed a methodology using mining and thematic analysis.

Provided examples and an online catalogue for reference.

Abstract

With the ever-increasing use of games, game developers are expected to write efficient code supporting several qualities such as security, maintainability, and performance. However, the continuous need to update the features of games in less duration might compel the developers to use anti-patterns, code smells and quick-fix solutions that may affect the functional and non-functional requirements of the game. These bad practices may lead to technical debt, poor program comprehension, and can cause several issues during software maintenance. Here, in this paper, we introduce "Software Nuggets" as a concept that affects software quality in a negative way and as a superset of anti-patterns, code smells, bugs, software bad practices. We call these Software Nuggets as "G-Nuggets" in the context of games. While there exists empirical research on games, we are not aware of any work on understanding and cataloguing these G-Nuggets. Thus, we propose a catalogue of G-Nuggets by mining and analyzing 892 commits, 189 issues, and 104 pull requests from 100 open-source GitHub game repositories. We use regular expressions and thematic analysis on this dataset for cataloguing game-specific Software Nuggets. We present a catalogue of ten G-Nuggets and provide examples for them present online at: https://phoebs88.github.io/A-Catalogue-of-Game-Specific-Software-Nuggets. We believe this catalogue might be helpful for researchers for further empirical research in the domain of games as well as for game developers to improve quality of games.