Abstract
Game development increasingly adopts bleeding-edge technologies such as Unity’s Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) to meet substantial scalability demands. However, the adoption of these new solutions also brings uncertainties to the system architecture. Although ArchHypo is an existing technique that uses hypothesis engineering to manage uncertainties in software architecture, it has never been adopted in the context of game development before. In this paper, we report the case study of Kardashev, a space strategy game targeting 128 million concurrent entities, which employed ArchHypo in its development. Over 8 months, we documented and validated 45 architectural hypotheses, which were categorized into five areas within the project: performance, scalability, reliability, maintainability, and architecture migration. Based on the results, this single-project case study demonstrates the feasibility of applying structured hypothesis-driven architecture practices to real-time game development. The systematic management of uncertainty through falsifiable hypotheses directed efforts that resulted in measurable improvements in critical quality attributes of the system, such as substantial performance gains, increased capacity, and elimination of the sources of observed crashes. As a result, this work establishes foundations for systematic uncertainty management in game development, demonstrating the viability of adopting ArchHypo in this context. In addition, this documented case study highlights how some important uncertainties were handled in the project, providing essential lessons for future projects.