Development Build Settings — What to Turn On and Off for a QA Build
How to configure Unity's Development Build and related options for QA, and what diagnostic evidence to check in a release-candidate build.
- unity
- build
- profiler
Blog
Notes from the trenches of Unity development and QA.
Sharing Builds with QA — What Has to Travel Alongside the Binary
The moment you hand a build to QA decides the quality of the reports that come back. Build identifiers, changelogs, known issues, and log retrieval paths — what needs to ship with the file, not just the file itself.
- unity
- qa
- build
How to capture the state before a crash
A stack trace only says where the game died. The logMessageReceived hook, the limits of the quitting event, watchdog processes, and periodic snapshots — four ways to keep the state leading up to a crash, and what each one costs.
- unity
- crash
- logging
What UnityCrashHandler64.exe actually is
What UnityCrashHandler64.exe is, where Windows crash artifacts live, and what to verify before changing a build that includes it.
- unity
- crash
- build
Where Unity crash logs actually live — editor, builds, and mobile
A crash leaves different artifacts than a normal session — different files, different locations, generated only when the process dies. Windows crash folders, macOS system reports, Android logcat, and iOS crash logs, organized as a request you can hand a tester.
- unity
- crash
- qa
Error Monitoring and QA Capture Solve Different Problems
Sentry-style error monitoring and QA bug capture have different primary jobs. This post separates exception telemetry from reporting game bugs that leave no exception.
- unity
- qa
- bug-report
If AI Runs the Test, Who Tests the AI? — Auditing Jev Gameplay Runs
How to distinguish gameplay defects, agent decision errors, and test harness failures by recording and reviewing the full Jev gameplay run.
- unity
- ai
- qa
When AI Finds a Bug, What Should a Human Check First? — Triaging Automated Play Reports with Jev
Separate severity, reproducibility, and evidence quality when triaging Jev automated-play reports, while keeping scoring policy and human review explicit.
- unity
- ai
- qa
When Jev Plays the Game, Who Captures the Bug?
How to connect game-specific anomaly checks to Rekon's code trigger so Jev-driven gameplay leaves behind the preceding video, logs, and state as evidence.
- unity
- ai
- qa
Free Combo (Recorder+OBS) vs Automation — When to Switch
How far a Unity Recorder plus OBS replay buffer combo actually gets you, and the math for deciding when automated capture starts paying off.
- unity
- qa
- recording
Unity Cloud Diagnostics Alternatives — What to Check During the Built-In Diagnostics Transition
Unity Cloud Diagnostics is being folded into Unity 6.2+ built-in Diagnostics. Here is what carries over and what you need to fill in yourself.
- unity
- crash
- bug-report
Unity Bug Reporting Tools Compared — Engine-Built-In to In-House
A category-by-category comparison of tools for capturing and reporting Unity bugs. The forks are whether it runs in builds, captures after the fact, has video, and syncs with game state.
- unity
- qa
- bug-report
What to Put in a Bug Report Snapshot of Game State
Four buckets for game state — environment, session, moment, and repro clues — ranked by cost versus value, what to leave out, and the traps you hit when serializing it.
- unity
- bug-report
- performance
Where Should the Report Go — Email, Webhooks, Jira, or Your Own Backend
Comparing four delivery paths for Unity bug reports — capacity, auth complexity, searchability, and maintenance cost.
- unity
- bug-report
- qa
A Close Look at Unity User Reporting — What It Gives You and What It Doesn't
What Unity's official User Reporting package actually puts in a report, what it leaves out, and the ongoing shift from Cloud Diagnostics to the built-in Diagnostics service in Unity 6.2+ — sticking to confirmed facts only.
- unity
- bug-report
- qa
Building an In-Game Bug Reporter for Unity — What to Build and Where to Stop
Trigger, capture, send, and identify — four independent decisions, the difficulty cliff between them, and the traps that show up when you build your own bug reporter.
- unity
- bug-report
- qa
Where Unity log files live — Editor.log, Player.log, and mobile log collection
Editor.log and Player.log paths per OS, the -logFile option, Android logcat and iOS log extraction. Everything about getting logs from QA, on one page.
- unity
- logging
- qa
Unity's logging system, in depth ③ — what IL2CPP and release builds change
Why log collection that worked perfectly in the editor behaves differently in a build. Stack trace settings, IL2CPP symbols and stripping, dev-build-only APIs, and the cost of Debug.Log itself.
- unity
- logging
- il2cpp
Unity's logging system, in depth ② — designing a GC-free ring buffer
A log collector that causes GC spikes defeats itself. Struct entries, fixed arrays, and telling controllable allocations apart from ones you never owned.
- unity
- logging
- performance
Unity's logging system, in depth ① — four pitfalls of the log callback
The exact difference between logMessageReceived and Threaded, UnityExceptions thrown inside the callback, recursive logging, and leaked subscriptions — the traps you actually hit when hooking logs.
- unity
- logging
- csharp
Recording Unity gameplay: 4 approaches compared — Recorder, OBS, capture SDKs, in-game
Comparing gameplay recording options for QA and bug reporting. Editor-only or not, always-on or not, synced with game data or not — those are the forks in the road.
- unity
- recording
- qa
Diagnosing "it stutters" tickets ③ — capturing performance data at the moment it happens
How to keep evidence of performance problems on QA machines with no Profiler attached. Lightweight always-on sampling with ProfilerRecorder, and putting the spike on the same timeline as the video.
- unity
- performance
- qa
Diagnosing "it stutters" tickets ② — pinning the culprit with Profiler and Frame Timing
The resolution test, what to actually look at in the Profiler, and splitting CPU/GPU time with FrameTimingManager. Turning felt reports into measured data.
- unity
- performance
- profiler
Diagnosing "it stutters" tickets ① — the four causes of frame drops
CPU-bound, GPU-bound, GC spikes, loading hitches. Frame drops need classification before measurement, because the four have opposite fixes.
- unity
- performance
- qa
A bug report template for game QA — copy it, and know why each field exists
A bug report template that raises reproduction rates. Covers why each field is there, and which kinds of tickets end up closed as cannot-reproduce.
- qa
- bug-report
- template
A minimal bug capture setup for Unity
Hooking logs into a ring buffer, snapshotting game state, and writing it to disk — the minimum code to attach to a Unity project, plus the threading pitfall.
- qa
- unity
- bug-report
Always record, keep only what you need — the rolling buffer approach to bug capture
Comparing deterministic replay, state snapshots, and rolling buffers — and how the rolling buffer, the easiest to bolt onto a game client, actually works.
- qa
- unity
- bug-report
"Cannot reproduce": what your Unity bug ticket is missing
The three reasons reproduction fails, what a bug ticket actually has to carry, and why writing it down by hand is structurally too late.
- qa
- unity
- bug-report