Software Architectures and the Creative Processes in Game Development

The goal of this thesis has been to perform research on the relationship between the creative team, software architecture, and game development processes. Researching this relationship was done in three stages. The first stage was a literature review into software architecture and game development. In the second stage a questionnaire was designed based on the literature review, and this questionnaire was then distributed to several game developers. In addition to querying the game developers on their knowledge on the field, they were also asked whether or not they would be willing to answer a set of follow-up questions later. The responses to the questionnaire provided a lot of answers, but also gave rise to new questions. In the third stage these new questions were incorporated into a follow-up survey which was distributed to those respondents whom had previously answered that they were willing to answer follow-up questions. The problem definition has been divided into five research questions according to the Goal Question Metric approach. Supported by the literature review and the responses to both the questionnaire and the survey, these five research questions have been answered in detail in Chapter 11: “Research Conclusions”. The results from this thesis is not generalizable to all game developers, but provides a very interesting glimpse into how the creative team is affected by, and is allowed to affect, the software architecture and tools used, as well as the game development process.