Empowering Game Developers through means of GSE techniques

Video games are unique software products that have many differences from traditional software. These pieces of software consist of big projects created by heterogeneous teams with the objective of making an emotionally charged experience. To this end, the video game industry needs to provide the player with large amounts of artistic content. We tackle the content creation and variability management challenges through software engineering techniques. Through industry-scale empirical evaluations, we demonstrate the efficacy and aptness of the proposed approaches: Software Product Lines that help create and manage video game elements, a Search- Based algorithm that generates software models in a Mixed-Initiative fashion between human and machine, and a Phylogenetic strategy towards content creation that unveils latent content within product families. These techniques needed to be adapted to the particular requirements of the video game craft. Always putting the humans and their creative process at the center of our research.