Understanding and Tackling the Challenges of Game Software Engineering

Video game development differs in certain aspects from traditional software development. Therefore, although it can benefit from much of the research focused on traditional Software Engineering, it also requires work that addresses the specific challenges of the video game industry. However, research in Game Software Engineering (GSE) is a field with significantly fewer studies and still-evolving direction and standards.

To delve deeper into the current challenges of GSE, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was conducted as part of this work. The SLR revealed an open and highly demanded challenge: Requirements Traceability (TLR). Additionally, it identified a lack of research on green computing. Consequently, the objective of this thesis is to present: an approach for TLR in GSE with an industrial case study; and a comparative analysis focused on energy consumption between two different implementation approaches in the Unreal Engine 5 game engine.

The proposed approach for TLR in GSE outperforms the reference model in all performance metrics. The comparative analysis shows that certain operations consume significantly more energy when implemented using the engine’s visual scripting language than when using C++ code. Furthermore, the study reveals that measuring the energy consumption of video games as if they were traditional software leads to overlooking key aspects. Therefore, this research proposes an additional metric: frames per second.

This thesis presents a compendium including three papers published in academic journals and conferences, developed during the research process: An SLR showing a steady increase in GSE research since 2009; the use of Non-Player Character (NPC) simulations reduces the search space by 99% and significantly improves TLR in real-world commercial GSE cases; and the energy impact of using a modeling language versus C++ code. Given the widespread popularity of video games, this work reveals that the energy cost could reach the equivalent of 28 million European households.