Debugging gameplay outside of unity

Hey guys,
I was just wondering your experiences when debugging gameplay.
The inspector and all the internal unity GUI system is powerful, but I wanted to enable my game to send information to an outside tool to gather gameplay informations for some frames, like events and component status.

Do you have any experience with something like that ?
Are you strictly using the stuff inside Unity ?

My idea was to use protocol buffer to write the data struct that I want to send over the network and then use that in the tool to create a view of the objects.

Thanks!

 

We have used Flurry for tracking game events and errors thrown by the application. The player metrics have been useful early on the get a feel for how long people play our game and when they stop. Demographics data was also useful and seeing as our game is multiplatform it is nice to know which devices our game is most often running on.

As for error logging, just being able to get an exception + stack trace is massively useful when compared to getting nothing. It requires little effort to get that information from Unity (RegisterLogCallback). In my experience, errors will occur for users that have never happened for the developer almost no matter how great you are at testing. Our logs does not contain detailed information about the state of the game at the time of the error but so far, it has been sufficient to identify the error and correct it. Your approach seems more ambitious and I can certainly see how state information can help solve issues.

You should consider whether you want to host the data yourself or have someone else do it. We chose Flurry because it is free (the analytics part at least) and it meant we did not have to spend time implementing capabilities for storing data and viewing it. The limitation of using something like Flurry is that it will not accept all types of data (e.g. It is difficult to represent a Vector3 in a meaningful way that will allow you to compare data). It is possible to download the raw data from Flurry to handle it yourself, but there are limitations to how much data may be downloaded at a time. On the plus side you get pretty graphs with no effort.

I have been looking into Game Analytics and I am curious if anyone have had experience with it and would care to share.