A case study on the availability of open-source components for game development

Abstract

Nowadays the amount of source code that is freely available inside open-source software repositories offers great reuse opportunities to software developers. Therefore, it is expected that the implementation of several requirements can be facilitated by reusing open source software components. In this paper, we focus on the reuse opportunities that can be offered in one specific application domain, i.e., game development. In particular, we performed an embedded multiple case study on approximately 110 open-source games, exploiting a large-scale repository of OSS components, and investigated: (a) which game genres can benefit from open source reuse, and (b) what types of requirements can the available open-source components map to. The results of the case study suggest that: (a) game genres with complex game logic, e.g., First Person Shooter, Strategy, Role-Playing, and Sport games offer the most reuse opportunities, and (b) the most common requirement types that can be developed by reusing OSS components are related to scenarios and characters.