# Dataset of Video Game Development Problems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.00491 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00491/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [CLIP meets GamePhysics: Towards bug identification in gameplay videos using zero-shot transfer learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11096/) (2022)
- [A Review and Roadmap of Deep Learning Causal Discovery in Different Variable Paradigms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06367/) (2022)
- [Typed Temporal Interaction Features for Simulation-Backed Forecasting of Open-Source Game Release Incidents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31647/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Different from traditional software development, there is little information about the software-engineering process and techniques in video-game development. One popular way to share knowledge among the video-game developers' community is the publishing of postmortems, which are documents summarizing what happened during the video-game development project. However, these documents are written without formal structure and often providing disparate information. Through this paper, we provide developers and researchers with grounded dataset describing software-engineering problems in video-game development extracted from postmortems. We created the dataset using an iterative method through which we manually coded more than 200 postmortems spanning 20 years (1998 to 2018) and extracted 1,035 problems related to software engineering while maintaining traceability links to the postmortems. We grouped the problems in 20 different types. This dataset is useful to understand the problems faced by developers during video-game development, providing researchers and practitioners a starting point to study video-game development in the context of software engineering.