What went wrong? A survey of problems in game development

Abstract

Despite its growth and profitability, many reports about game projects show that their production is not a simple task, but one beset by common problems and still distant from having a healthy and synergetic work process. The goal of this article is to survey the problems in the development process of electronic games, which are mainly collected from game postmortems, by exploring their similarities and differences to well-known problems in traditional information systems.

Software Architectures and the Creative Processes in Game Development

“…In [24], Scacchi presents how the free and open source development practices in the game community differs from traditional software engineering practices. In [25], a survey of problems in game development is presented based on an analysis of postmortems written by various game developers. According to Flood, all game development postmortems say the same things: the project was delivered behind schedule; it contained many defects; the functionalities were not the ones that had originally been projected; and it took a lot of pressure and an immense number of development hours to complete the project [26].…”

The Effectiveness and Efficiency of Model Driven Game Design

“…Looking at the common problems encountered during game development, problems regarding design and managing game features are the most prominent [15]. Traditionally, the content and scope of a game's design is recorded using a game design document.…”

2nd Workshop on Game Development and Model-Driven Software Development

“…Hence, we face ambitious demands regarding the overall development process. However, the growing complexity and scale were not encountered by refined game development methods for many years [2]. Only recently, agile project management methods like Scrum were applied successfully in several productions [3], [4], [5].…”