Game development is a complex and labor-intensive endeavor. Game environments, storylines, audio, and character behaviors are carefully crafted requiring graphics artists, storytellers, and software developers to work in unison. Often games end up with a delicate mix of hard-wired behavior in the form of traditional code and somewhat more responsive behavior in the form of large collections of complex rules. Similarly, audio, video, and graphics are carefully and manually curated and synchronized with game actions. The addition of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) have only added to the many challenges that game developers and storytellers face.

Framework programming is regarded as one the main advantages of object-oriented software engineering, and is expected to increase software reuse. In exploiting frameworks, however, programmers often face difficulties caused by the complexity of the hidden architecture and the multiplicity of the design decisions that are embedded in a framework. Interactive visualization of design patterns occurring in a framework shows how the framework is operating, in a flexible yet structured way that contributes to the programmer's understanding of the underlying software architecture. In this way, programmers can explore and use frameworks efficiently even when they are distributed without vast amounts of documentation and source code.