Game developers often find themselves coming up with ideas along the production period of a game varying in size and may go unnoticed or seem insignificant to the scope of the project but in the long run add up to break deadlines, budget and affect the morale and engagement of developers. In the modern game development industry agile development methods have increased in popularity allowing flexibility in the development process. This agile approach has emerged from traditional software development where waterfall development methods are common practice (Kanode and Haddad, 2009). Through in-depth interviews with developers from Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom this study aims to explore how feature creep is perceived by the individual developer and its effect on the day-to-day development. The ambition is to establish whether feature creeping as a phenomenon can be a useful tool for innovation and work culture. / Spelutvecklare får kontinuerligt idéer under produktionen som varierar i storlek och kan gå obemärkta eller anses meningslösa för projektets ramar och över tid och kan påverka deadline, budget, moral och engagemang hos spelutvecklare. I dagens spelindustri har agila arbetsmetoder ökat i popularitet som möjliggör flexibla utvecklingsprocesser. De agila arbetssättet har vuxit fram ur traditionell mjukvaruutveckling där vattenfallsmetoder är ofta förekommit (Kanode och Haddad, 2009). Genom ingående intervjuer med utvecklare från Sverige, Finland och Storbritannien undersöker den här studien hur feature creep upplevs av den enskilda spelutvecklaren och dess effekt på det dagliga utvecklandet i spelbranschen med en ambition att se hur fenomenet feature creep kan vara ett användbart verktyg för innovation och arbetskulturen.

The video game industry can be ruthless. As a developer, you usually find yourself working in the popular third-party development tools of the time. These tools however might not provide the best usability and quality of life one desires. This can lead to a lot of frustration for the developer, especially when the development enters a crunch period of long and hard work. We believe some of the frustration can be avoided, and we believe this can be done by creating effective, functional and user-friendly integrated development tools specialized for the development environment. In this master's thesis we investigated just that, how integrated game development tools can be designed to be usable in terms of effectiveness and learnability. The investigation was performed by designing and implementing an integrated game development tool. The development of the tool was performed iteratively with user testing between every iteration to find usability defects, allowing the tool to be refined and improved throughout the development process. To finish off the development process, there was a final user test where professional video game developers tried out the tool and then answered a System Usability Scale questionnaire. The System Usability Scale score and task completion rate showed that the final state of the tool can be considered highly usable in terms of effectiveness and averagely usable in terms of learnability. This suggests that involving user testing in the development process is vital for ensuring good usability in the end product.

This study examines the possibility of creating a roleplaying game as a tool for starting conversation about diversity and inclusion in games, specifically for the Game Development programs at the University of Skövde. First it is examined why it is needed, how other games have been used for educational purposes, what to think about when creating spaces of dialogue, and what it is like to teach the topics in game education. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the testing of the game was limited. The project uses three different ways of evaluation; interviews with faculty members at the University, feedback on a design document and an online playtest. The results suggest that the game could potentially be used to gamify some aspects of dialogue about diversity and inclusion within the curriculums of the Game Development programs at the University of Skövde, as a compliment alongside pre-existing lectures and seminars.

Replayability in games is important to many players as it increases the amount of play time they get out of a game for the price they paid, which is why it is interesting to know how replayability can be promoted in games with simple mechanics. Previous research has categorised what motivates players to play a game again, as aspects of replayability. These aspects and the inherent subjectivity of replayability have been taken into account to define replayability. In this study, a game is designed to be replayable according to those definitions and then iterated on three times. Four different tools and principles for designing for replayability are used and evaluated in the design. All four tools and principles are considered in the initial design, after which one or a few are selected to be used in each game iteration. For each version of the game, the reason for, and the theory behind, design decisions is documented. The game is then released and player data and answers to two questions within the game are gathered to inform reflection. After which the design is reflected on before designing the next iteration. Four different tools and principles were tested as part of the design process. The Periodic Dilemma Generator (Aghekyan, 2021), the Aspects of Replayability (Krall and Menzies, 2012) (Monedero March, 2019), game elements based on randomisation (Bycer, 2018), and a tool to add synergy (Rosewater, 2013). Each of them proved to be useful in different ways. The Aspects of Replayability helped focus the design as goals to work towards. The Periodic Dilemma Generator tool was used throughout the design as both a design tool and a guide for creating meaningful choices. Randomisation was added as part of the game’s initial design and remained the main source of variance throughout all iterations. Designing synergy between game elements then enhanced both the Periodic Dilemma Generator and the randomised variance, making it the tool that provided the most replayability in the game. Using these tools and principles together, they can guide the design to enhance the complexity of a simple game to promote replayability. / Omspelbarhet i spel är viktigt för många spelare då det ökar mängden speltid de får ut av ett spel för det pris de betalade, därför är det intressant att veta hur man kan främja omspelbarhet i spel med enkla mechanics. Tidigare forskning har kategoriserat vad som motiverar spelare att spela ett spel igen. Det kallas aspekter av omspelbarhet. Dessa aspekter och subjektiviteten av omspelbarhet har beaktats för att definiera konceptet. I den här studien designas ett spel för att vara omspelbart enligt de definitionerna och sedan designas tre ytterligare iterationer. Fyra olika verktyg och principer som handlar om att designa för omspelbarhet används och evalueras i designen. Alla fyra verktyg och principer används i den ursprungliga designen, varefter en eller ett fåtal av dem väljs till att användas för att designa varje iteration. För varje version av spelet dokumenteras orsaken till, och teorin bakom, designbeslut. Spelet släpps sedan och spelardata och svar på två frågor inom spelet samlas in för att informera vid reflektion. Varefter designen reflekteras över innan nästa iteration utformas. Fyra olika verktyg och principer testades som en del av designprocessen. Verktyget Periodic Dilemma Generator (Aghekyan, 2021), principen Aspects of Replayability (Krall och Menzies, 2012) (Monedero March, 2019), spelelement baserade på randomisering (Bycer, 2018) och ett verktyg för att lägga till synergi (Rosewater, 2013). De visade sig alla vara användbara på olika sätt. Aspects of Replayability hjälpte till att fokusera designen som genom att agera som mål att arbeta mot. Periodic Dilemma Generator användes genom hela designen som både ett designverktyg och som en guide för att skapa meningsfulla val. Randomisering lades till som en del av spelets ursprungliga design och förblev den huvudsakliga källan till varians genom alla iterationer. Att designa synergi mellan spelelementen förbättrade sedan både Periodic Dilemma Generator och den randomiserade variansen, vilket gjorde det till det verktyg som gav mest omspelbarhet i spelet. Genom att använda dessa verktyg och principer tillsammans kan de vägleda designen för att förbättra komplexiteten i ett enkelt spel och främja omspelbarhet.

This thesis compares two modeling methods, subdivision and booleans, which are used for the creation of hard surface assets in the gaming industry. The parameters that are assessed are the time taken to create the models with the respective method and the quality of the models. Quality refers to the presence of shading artifacts. In order to compare the methods, models of varying complexity have been created, the time of creation has been measured and experts in 3D modeling have assessed the quality. The results show that the boolean method is better suited for complex models, while both methods work well for simpler models. / Den här avhandlingen jämför två modelleringsmetoder, subdivision och booleans, som används för skapandet av hardsurface assets inom spelbranschen. Parametrarna som bedöms är den tid det tar att skapa modellerna med respektive metod och kvalitén på modellerna. Med kvalité avses förekomsten av shading artefakter. För att jämföra metoderna har modeller av varierande komplexitet skapats, skapandets tid har mätts och experter inom 3D-modellering har bedömt kvalitén. Resultatet visar att booleansmetoden är bättre lämpad för komplexa modeller medan båda metoder fungerar bra för simplare modeller.

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This paper analyses the players’ perception of the feedback and polling systems of OldSchool RuneScape to determine what level of participatory design is achieved by the feedback and polling systems used in the game. The aim of the research is to increase the availability of knowledge regarding participatory design in live-service games, as only limited coverage of the topic exists. The study uses an adapted survey created by Segalowitz and Chamorro-Koc that uses three different metrics to measure genuine participation. The survey was presented to in-game players and users of the game’s different forums. It was determined that a high level of genuine participation and participatory design is achieved.

Background. The frame rate of a game is important for both the end-user and the developer. Maintaining at least 60 FPS in a PC game is the current standard, and demands for efficient game applications rise. Currently, the industry standard within programming is to use Object-Oriented Design (OOD). But with the trend of larger sized games, this frame rate might not be maintainable using OOD. A design pattern that mitigates this is the Data-Oriented Design (DOD) which focuses on utilizing the CPU and memory efficiently. These design patterns differ in how they handle the data associated with them. Objectives. In this thesis, two games were created with two versions that used either OOD or DOD. The first game had multithreading included. New hardware utilizes several CPU cores, therefore, this thesis compares both singlethreaded and multithreaded versions of these design patterns.Methods. Experiments were made to measure the execution time and cache misses on the CPU. Each experiment started with a baseline that was gradually increased to stress the systems under test.Results. The results gathered from the experiments showed that the sections of the code that used DOD were significantly faster than OOD. DOD also had a better affinity with multithreading and was able to achieve at certain parts up to 13 times the speed of equivalent conditioned OOD. In the special case comparison DOD, even though it had larger objects, proved to be faster than OOD.Conclusions. DOD has shown to be significantly faster in execution time with fewer cache misses compared to OOD. Using multithreading for DOD presented to be the most efficient.

Datorspel har växt i popularitet för vart år som gått och involverar idag flera miljarder aktiva spelare världen över. Idag visar statistik på en nästintill jämlik fördelning av män och kvinnor som spelar men ändå anses fortfarande den stereotypiska gamern som manlig. Detta har lett till att det finns problem med representativa kvinnliga spelkaraktärer i många spel då problem kring hypersexualiserade karaktärer, karaktärer i stereotypiska könsroller samt även exkludering av kvinnliga karaktärer har förekommit under många år. Detta kan till viss del tänkas vara på grund av att spelindustrin länge varit fylld av en majoritet av manliga utvecklare och arbetare som även utvecklar spelkaraktärer gentemot en manlig publik. Men i och med vikten av karaktärs identifiering när de kommer till en bra spelupplevelse är de viktigt att ta reda på var kvinnliga gamers anser är bra kvinnliga spelkaraktärer och vilka attribut som borde fokuserar på vid utvecklingen av kvinnliga spelkaraktärer. Genom en webbenkät som riktade sig mot kvinnliga gamers världen över och frågeställningen “Vad kännetecknar bra kvinnliga spelkaraktärer enligt kvinnliga gamers?” samlades kvalitativ data in som gav djupare insikt i vad som krävs i den framtida utvecklingen av kvinnliga spelkaraktärer. I resultatet finns trender om vikten av välskrivna, utvecklade och mångfaldiga karaktärer men även att karaktärernas personlighet och roll verkar ha större betydelse än dess utseende när det kommer till aspekter om vad som gör en bra spelkaraktär. Det uttrycktes många åsikter om att översexualisering av kvinnliga karaktärer inte är önskvärd. Däremot tyckte majoriteten att en förbättring skett inom spelindustrin de senaste åren när det kommer till kvinnliga representation men att det finns mycket som fortfarande måste göras på den fronten. Därför rekommenderas det med framtida studier inom området för att ytterligare navigera vad som kan göras för att förbättra spelindustrin i samband med spelkaraktärer. / Videogames grow in popularity every year and today there are several billion active users around the world. Todays statistics show an almost equal distribution between men and women that play videogames but the stereotypical gamer is still seen as male. This has lead to some representative problems for women in videogames where, for many years, many games have female characters that are oversexualised, in stereotypical gender roles or even exclude female characters all together.This can partially be because of the fact that the gaming industry have been dominated by male developers for many years and they develop games to a generally male audience. With the importance of character identification when it comes to a good gaming experience and the negative effects these representation issues can have on girls and women it is now important that we find out what female gamers considers make a good female game character and what attributes should be the focus when developing good female game characters. With the help of a web survey, a target of female gamers around the world and the research question “What characterizes good female game characters according to female gamers?” qualitative data was collected that gave a deeper insight into what it takes to develop good female game characters. The results show trends about the importance of well written, developed and diverse characters but also the fact that the characters personality and role is more important than their appearance when it comes to making good female game characters. Many opinions on oversexualisation were expressed and the fact that this was not a desirable trait for female characters. Many also expressed the opinion that the female representation in videogames has become better in the last couple of years but that there is still a long way still until it can be considered good. That is why future research within the field is encouraged so that we can navigate what it takes to improve the gaming industry when it comes to game characters.

The development of video games is a long and expensive process, and it is not uncommon for studios to require their workers to work overtime to meet deadlines, resulting in stressful work environments and reduced worker performance. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) research have people excited that perhaps this might change. Perhaps AI could supplement game developers, saving time and resources. A case study was performed to explore the use of AI models Chat-GPT and DALL-E in computer game development, assessing their viability in different computer game development areas such as programming, game development and 2D art. With predetermined criteria, based on feedback from professionals and students within the area of game development, the AI models were tasked with ten separate challenges for each category. The results showed that the AI models are not yet ready to become full-fledged developers. However, they are viable collaborative partners for a wide array of game development tasks.