Beyond Code: Handling Variability in Art Artifacts in Mobile Game Product Lines

In Software Product Line (SPL) engineering [1], while focusing on exploiting the commonality within the products, adequate support must be available for customizing the SPL core in order to derive a particular SPL instance. The more diverse the domain, the harder it is to accomplish this task. This, in some cases, may outweigh the cost of developing the SPL core itself. Therefore, variability management is at the core of SPL. Such variability spans various artifacts, from requirements to code and tests. Depending on the domain, additional artifacts should also be considered. In particular, in Mobile Game Product Lines [2,3,4], art-related artifacts such as image and sound need to be addressed. Such artifacts are part of the core assets and their design and maintenance demand significant resources from organizations in this domain. Additionally, during product derivation, in which a game is ported to many devices, the great diversity of such devices complicates managing variability for sound and image. Failing to address variability in these artifacts adequately affect product derivation and also impact on other artifacts, such as code, thereby increasing the difficulty in managing its variation. Based on our industrial experience, we address variability management of images and sound in the Mobile Game Product Lines. First, we briefly review variability issues in this domain and how they arise (Section 2). Next, we present some variability mechanism for such artifacts and reason how their choice is influenced by some factors, such as performance, binding time, and reusability (Sections 3 and 4). Finally, we evaluate how changing such mechanism affects variability management of code (Section 5).