Debugging of Live Unity Games

Hi all, I’ve recently been working on the idea of implementing the ability log errors in clients that have already been released. I’ve released several mobile games in my life and one thing that is always a pain is that users find bugs you didn't find in QA, but reproducing and solving the bugs they experience is QUITE difficult, especially if your game is multiplayer.

I am planning to try some experiments with sending game logs from a production version of a game I’m working on from some of Unity’s existing Logging plugins to Loggly, a cloud-based log collection & visualization platform.

My goal is to be able to able to catch post-release production bugs as soon as they occur so that I can fix them immediately so that I can increase player retention by having an almost completely bug-free game.

I plan to post the results in a blog-format here, and possibly post a git with my sources, would anyone be interested in seeing this done?

 

I haven't actually released a game myself yet, but just seeing the bugs and security flaws in any game, unity or not... this is something you should consider doing, as QA testing, as you pointed out, isn't always accurate, and can often take a lot of time.

So yes, for not only your own sake, but for the sake of hardcore game devs, and of course, happy gamers, I recommend doing this. It will definitely, by the looks of it, save a lot of headaches trying to figure out a weird bug no one else gets!

 

The simple method that many developers uses is to check the game folder when the game is started to see if a log exist. This log is then sent to the server, often after the user has consented to sending it. This is important because it is unlawful in some countries to scan for files and automatically sending them (This is why many webpages now asks you if it is okay to store cookies etc). The benefit is that you can give the user a text field at the same time where he can describe what happened to the game. I haven't seen code that is able to properly log every bug in existence, it might happen that you start to receive a lot of junk logs that doesn't tell you anything and this is when the users own description becomes useful.

You could even add a button in the options menu that allows users to report bugs and send feedback but...

The drawback with systems like this is that they can end up sending you an overwhelming amount of bug reports... it is not uncommon in professional game studios to employ people in QA that is only responsible for wading through occasional bug tsunamis.