Citation: Almansoury, F.; Kpodjedo,
S.; El Boussaidi, G. Game
Development Topics: A Tag-Based
Investigation on Game Development
Stack Exchange. Appl. Sci. 2022, 12,
10750. https://doi.org/10.3390/
app122110750
Academic Editors: Robertas
Damaševiˇcius, Sanjay Misra and
Bharti Suri
Received: 17 July 2022
Accepted: 20 September 2022
Published: 24 October 2022
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Article
Game Development Topics: A Tag-Based Investigation on
Game Development Stack Exchange
Farag Almansoury *
,†
, Segla Kpodjedo *
,†
and Ghizlane El Boussaidi
†
École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS), University of Quebec, Montreal, QC H3C 1K3, Canada
* Correspondence: farag.almansoury.1@etsmtl.ca (F.A.); segla.kpodjedo@etsmtl.ca (S.K.)
† These authors contributed equally to this work.
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.
Keywords: video-game development; empirical study; stack exchange
1. Introduction
The video-game industry is one that has been thriving and growing, from around USD
1B in revenue in 1971 to USD 43B in 2000 and USD 180B in 2020 (https://www.marketwatch.
com/story/videogames-are-a-bigger-industry-than-sports-and-movies-combined-thanks-
to-the-pandemic-11608654990 (accessed on 1 October 2021)). The field has steadily grown
and evolved with technology: from arcades dominating the 1970s and 1980s to game
consoles, handheld devices, and PCs becoming the main platforms in the 1990s and early
2000s. Since 2011, mobile devices are the dominant platform; they represent 48% of the
gaming market, followed by Personal Computers (25%), game consoles (19%), and emerg-
ing technology such as Virtual Reality headsets (3%). Despite such growth and dynamism,
the video game industry has yet to receive appropriate and lasting levels of interest from
the software engineering research community [1,2].
Prior research from the software engineering community has investigated possible
differences between the development of video-games vs. non-video-game software prod-
ucts. Video-games have distinctive features that make them complex to design and test.
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 10750. https://doi.org/10.3390/app122110750 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci
