  With the ever-increasing use of games, game developers are expected to write
efficient code supporting several qualities such as security, maintainability,
and performance. However, the continuous need to update the features of games
in less duration might compel the developers to use anti-patterns, code smells
and quick-fix solutions that may affect the functional and non-functional
requirements of the game. These bad practices may lead to technical debt, poor
program comprehension, and can cause several issues during software
maintenance. Here, in this paper, we introduce "Software Nuggets" as a concept
that affects software quality in a negative way and as a superset of
anti-patterns, code smells, bugs, software bad practices. We call these
Software Nuggets as "G-Nuggets" in the context of games. While there exists
empirical research on games, we are not aware of any work on understanding and
cataloguing these G-Nuggets. Thus, we propose a catalogue of G-Nuggets by
mining and analyzing 892 commits, 189 issues, and 104 pull requests from 100
open-source GitHub game repositories. We use regular expressions and thematic
analysis on this dataset for cataloguing game-specific Software Nuggets. We
present a catalogue of ten G-Nuggets and provide examples for them present
online at:
https://phoebs88.github.io/A-Catalogue-of-Game-Specific-Software-Nuggets. We
believe this catalogue might be helpful for researchers for further empirical
research in the domain of games as well as for game developers to improve
quality of games.
