Per Backlund
School of Informatics
Per Backlund
Professor of Informatics
Sweden Game Arena is a co-operation between University of Skövde, Science Park Skövde and Skövde municipality. The project aims to build the research- and development community for game development in Skövde and Region Västra Götaland. The project has three main activities: research and education in game development and incubation specializing in incubation game studios.
University of Skövde is responsible for the research and education parts. We aim to do research that is motivated by the needs of the studios and start-ups in the Sweden Game Arena community. Research is done in co-operation with studios and start-ups and we aim to produce relevant results for the business partners. At this time Sweden Game Arena have one doctoral thesis project, Tobias Karlsson's: Game development, processes and level design
Game development, processes and level design
Digital games are advanced sociotechnical systems. They include advanced hardware which at the technical front edge and the demands from consumers on virtual worlds to interact with in real time are high. At the same time, studies of computer games are multidisciplinary, involving, for example, art, media, and technology and user experience.
This entails development challenges which are very specific to computer game development which make game development projects complex in various ways. For example, the scale of the multidisciplinearity is very high and one challenge is to coordinate the artistic and technical visions that together form a good game.
Limited empirical research
At the same time empirical research on the development processes of game developers is limited. And there is a need to study these practices in order to aggregate sound empirical findings on game development. This project started in January 2020.
