Technical Report A Survey on a State of the Practice in Video Game Development

Video Game Software Development is a promising area of empirical research because our first observations in industry environment identified a lack of a systematic process and method support and rarely conducted/documented studies. Nevertheless, video games specific types of software products focus strongly on user interface and game design. Thus, engineering processes, methods for game construction and verification/validation, and best-practices, derived from traditional software engineering, might be applicable in context of video game development. We selected the Austrian games industry as a manageable and promising starting point for systematically capturing the state-of-the practice in Video game development. In this paper we present the survey design and report on the first results of a national survey in the Austrian games industry. The results of the survey showed that the Austrian games industry is organized in a set of small and young studios with the trend to ad-hoc and flexible development processes and limitations in systematic method support.