Also, Entertainment Software Association (ESA) ( 2014) 2015) reports highlighted the latest trends about the software game industry. Newzoo Game Market ( 2015) has also reported that the world-wide digital game market will reach $113.3 billion by 2018.Ĭreation of any game involves cross-functional teams including designers, software developers, musicians, script writers, and many others. The software game market throughout the world has grown by over 7–8 % annually and has reached sales of around $5.5 billion in 2015 (SUPERDATA 2015). However, despite the high complexity of the software engineering development process, the game industry is making billions of dollars in profit and creating many hours of fun (PWC, 2011–2014 outlook). The multidisciplinary nature of the processes that combine sound, art, control systems, artificial intelligence (AI), and human factors, also makes the software game development practice different from traditional software development. Software games have now become a worldwide creative industry, but because of the multidisciplinary activities required, their development is a very complex task. Software games are software applications that are installed on hardware devices such as video game consoles, computers, handheld devices, and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). Salen and Zimmerman ( 2003) defined “game is a software application in which one or more players make decisions by controlling game objects and resources, in the pursuit of its goal”.

In today’s culture, technology is easily accessible and has become more convenient more and more people like to play games and are also becoming motivated to design their own games. A new and popular mode of entertainment and an important application of technology are software games, which have become increasingly accepted by people of all ages. It affects every aspect of our lives today, including working, living, learning, and education. With the rapid advancement of computer technology, the significance of software engineering in our daily lives is increasing. The results of this study suggest that the game development software engineering process has many aspects that need further attention from researchers that especially includes the postproduction phase. By contrast, the post-production phase has received much less research activity than the pre-production and production phases. The largest number of studies have been reported in the production phase of the game development software engineering process life cycle, followed by the pre-production phase. In the study, we used a systematic literature review methodology based on well-known digital libraries. The purpose of this study is to assesses the state of the art research on the game development software engineering process and highlight areas that need further consideration by researchers. However, the underline software engineering techniques help game development to achieve maintainability, flexibility, lower effort and cost, and better design. Multidisciplinary nature of the game development processes that combine sound, art, control systems, artificial intelligence (AI), and human factors, makes the software game development practice different from traditional software development. Software game is a kind of application that is used not only for entertainment, but also for serious purposes that can be applicable to different domains such as education, business, and health care.

Video game software categories