An evolutionary approach for generating software models: The case of Kromaia in Game Software Engineering

Abstract In the context of Model-Driven Engineering applied to video games, software models are high-level abstractions that represent source code implementations of varied content such as the stages of the game, vehicles, or enemy entities (e.g., final bosses). In this work, we present our Evolutionary Model Generation (EMoGen) approach to generate software models that are comparable in quality to the models created by human developers. Our approach is based on an evolution (mutation and crossover) and assessment cycle to generate the software models. We evaluated the software models generated by EMoGen in the Kromaia video game, which is a commercial video game released on Steam and PlayStation 4. Each model generated by EMoGen has more than 1000 model elements. The results, which compare the software models generated by our approach and those generated by the developers, show that our approach achieves results that are comparable to the ones created manually by the developers in the retail and digital versions of the video game case study. However, our approach only takes five hours of unattended time in comparison to ten months of work by the developers. We perform a statistical analysis, and we make an implementation of EMoGen readily available.