Game Development Topics: A Tag-Based Investigation on Game Development Stack Exchange

Abstract

Video-game development, despite being a multi-billion-dollar industry, has not attracted sustained attention from software engineering researchers and remains understudied from a software engineering perspective. We aim to uncover, from game developers’ perspectives, which video game development topics are the most asked about and which are the most supported, in order to provide insights about technological and conceptual challenges game developers and managers may face on their projects. To do so, we turned to the Game Development Stack Exchange (GDSE), a prominent Question and Answer forum dedicated to game development. On that forum, users ask questions and tag them with keywords recognized as important categories by the community. Our study relies on those tags, which we classify either as technology or concept topics. We then analysed these topics for their levels of community attention (number of questions, views, upvotes, etc.) and community support (whether their questions are answered and how long it takes). Related to community attention, we found that topics with the most questions include concepts such as 2D and collision detection and technologies such as Unity and C#, whereas questions touching on concepts such as video and augmented reality and technologies such as iOS, Unreal-4 and Three.js generally lack satisfactory answers. Moreover, by pairing topics, we uncovered early clues that, from a community support perspective, (i) the pairing of some technologies appear more challenging (e.g., questions mixing HLSL and MonoGame receive a relatively lower level of support); (ii) some concepts may be more difficult to handle conjointly (e.g., rotation and movement); and some technologies may prove more challenging to use to address a given concept (e.g., Java for 3D). Our findings provide insights to video game developers on the topics and challenges they might encounter and highlight tool selection and integration for video game development as a promising research direction.