Are Existing Code Smells Relevant in Web Games? An Empirical Study

In software applications, code smells are considered as bad coding practices acquired at the time of development. The presence of such code smells in games may affect the process of game development adversely. Our preliminary study aims at investigating the existence of code smells in the games. To achieve this, we used JavaScript code smells detection tool JSNose against 361 JavaScript web games to find occurrences of JavaScript smells in games. Further, we conducted a manual study to find violations of known game programming patterns in 8 web games to verify the necessity of game-specific code smells detection tool. Our results shows that existing JavaScript code smells detection tool is not sufficient to find game-specific code smells in web games.