A Catalogue of Game-Specific Anti-Patterns

Abstract

With the ever-increasing use of games, game developers are expected to write efficient code and support several aspects such as security, maintainability, and performance. However, the continuous need to update the features of games in shorter duration might compel the developers to use anti-patterns, code smells and quick-fix solutions that may affect the functional and non-functional requirements of the game. These bad practices may lead to technical debt, poor program comprehension, and can cause several issues during software maintenance. While there exists empirical research on games, we are not aware of any work on understanding and cataloguing these anti-patterns in the domain of games. Thus, in this paper, we propose a catalogue of game-specific anti-patterns by mining and analyzing 892 commits, 189 issues, and 104 pull requests from 100 open-source GitHub game repositories. We use regular expressions and thematic analysis on this dataset and present a catalogue of ten game-specific anti-patterns along with examples. We see this catalogue as a first step for further empirical research in the domain of games and can help game developers to improve quality of games.