Identifying Video Game Debugging Bottlenecks: An Industry Perspective
Carlos Pinto Gomez, Fabio Petrillo
TL;DR
The paper investigates bottlenecks in debugging video games by conducting four studies with 20 industry developers, focusing on how bugs are reproduced, inspected, and resolved. Using bug-database analysis, surveys, observations, and interviews, it quantifies time spent on inspection and reproduction, and highlights cross-disciplinary collaboration as central to debugging effectiveness. The key findings show that system localization and nondeterministic reproduction are the main pain points, with engine/editor tools playing a critical role and demand for digest-oriented tooling to manage large data. The work offers practical implications for tooling and data capture to accelerate bug reproduction and cross-team coordination, with potential generalization to other game-development contexts that share similar bug categories.
Abstract
Conventional debugging techniques used in traditional software are similarly used when debugging video games. However, the reality of video games require its own set of unique debugging techniques such as On-Screen Console, Debug Draws, Debug Camera, Cheats and In-Game Menus, and Data Scrubbing. In this article, we provide insights from a video game studio on how 20 seasoned industry game developers debug during the production of a game. Our experiments rely on the recordings of debugging sessions for the most critical bugs categorized as Crashes, Object Behaviors, and Object Persistence. In this paper, we focus on identifying the debugging activities that bottleneck bug resolution. We also identify the debugging tools used to perform debugging techniques. Lastly, we present how different disciplines collaborate during debugging and how technical roles are at the core of debugging. Our thematic analysis has identified game developers spend 36.6\% of their time inspecting game artifacts and 35.1\% of their time reproducing the bug locally.