A catalogue of game-specific anti-patterns based on GitHub and Game Development Stack Exchange

Abstract

With the ever-increasing use of games, game developers are expected to write efficient code and support several aspects such as security, maintainability, and performance. However, the need for frequent updates in game development may lead to quick-fix solutions and bad coding practices. Though unintentional, these bad practices may lead to poor program comprehension and can cause several issues during software maintenance. The quick-fix solutions might lead to technical debts due to the presence of anti-patterns and code smells, which may affect the functional and non-functional requirements of the game. To avoid such instances, game developers may need some guidelines to refer to during the game development process. Thus, to aid developers and researchers, in our previous work, we had presented an initial catalogue of anti-patterns in the domain of game development. To broaden the scope of the catalogue and diversify the instances of anti-patterns, we analyzed additional data from a Q&A platform. We present 15 game-specific anti-patterns based on thematic analysis of 189 issues, 892 commits, 104 pull requests from 100 open-source GitHub game repositories, and 971 questions from Game Development Stack Exchange. We see the catalogue as an effort towards improving the development and quality of the games. The catalogue containing a detailed description of every anti-pattern with the context, problem, solution, example(s), and their occurrences on GitHub and Game Development Stack Exchange is available at https://rishalab.github.io/Catalog-of-Game-Antipatterns/.