As a Gaming Developer, Which Error-Monitoring System Should I Use?

We’re excited to announce that Bugsnag now supports error monitoring and stability management for Unreal Engine mobile games.

Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal.

Initially developed for PC first-person shooters, Unreal Engine has since been used in a variety of genres of three-dimensional (3D) games. It has also been widely adopted by the film and television industry.

Written in C++, the Unreal Engine features a high degree of portability and supports a range of desktop, mobile, console, and virtual reality platforms.

Bugsnag already provides stability monitoring to help engineering teams with a range of mobile and desktop platforms and frameworks.

We're excited about extending our support for mobile platforms to include Unreal Engine. Developers will now have the actionable insights and analytics they need to increase the stability of their games and deliver a streamlined experience to their fans.

Manage the Stability of Unreal Engine Games With Bugsnag

Gain real-time visibility and actionable insights into stability.

Development teams are releasing new versions and game modes more and more frequently to engage and retain users.

With Bugsnag, you can understand the stability of every release and see how rapidly new releases are being adopted by users. You can compare release health to decide if they’re healthy enough to promote to production, or if they need to be pulled back.

Setting your target stability and critical stability allows you to use the real-time stability scores to make data-driven decisions about when to build features in your application vs. focus on bug fixing.

Essentially, if your game’s stability is below critical stability, the development team needs to focus on bug fixing and if it’s above target stability, they can focus on building new features.

Additionally, the interactive timeline analysis helps you understand stability issues over time. You can pinpoint error spikes, investigate specific incidents, determine if a release has introduced new bugs, and more.

Remember:

Not all bugs are worth fixing. Prioritize fixing the bugs that matter.

Understand which bugs are occurring more frequently and impacting the most users.

View errors grouped by root cause and sorted by user impact so you can make data-driven decisions about which errors need to be addressed first.

Prioritize Fixing the Bugs That Matter

Not all bugs are created equal and you may want to prioritize fixing errors that are impacting superfans or your revenue generating customers.

You can easily choose which meta data to collect for each error, such as the user’s spending tier, and then segment errors that are affecting paying gamers.

Errors impacting business-critical app functions, such as the user sign-up or in-app purchase flows, are also more important to address quickly to minimize further impact to your businesses’ bottom line.

Using error segmentation in Bugsnag, you can see which errors are impacting a certain part of the codebase, such as the one supporting game token purchases, so you can prioritize fixing them right away.

Customize Error Views and Alerts

Using bookmarks, which are a set of saved error segmentation filters, error views can be configured in the Project Overview Dashboard for each team member working on building and maintaining the game.

An error view includes a feed of errors and a trend graph to show how errors are impacting the stability of the segment.

You can set up error views for VIP users or superfans, in-app purchase flows, and even ad networks. Gaining visibility into errors originating from ad SDKs can help you decide if you need to turn off an erratic SDK that is negatively impacting the gaming experience.

You can use the same bookmarks for configuring error alerts, so that you are only notified of errors occurring in segments that matter to you.

This way you can improve the signal-to-noise ratio and focus the team on addressing errors that will have the greatest impact on improving app stability and user experience.

You can:

• Fix errors with speed and precision to minimize further impact to user experience.

• Get to the root cause of errors quickly with comprehensive diagnostics.

  
  

Comprehensive Diagnostics and Error Reproduction

Reproducing and fixing errors is easier when you can understand exactly what caused the crash.

See comprehensive diagnostic information for every error, including symbolicated stack traces, user interaction breadcrumbs, device and user information.

Error reports also include Unreal-specific metadata, such as the MapUrl of the last loaded level, any custom User Activity you set within the app code, and the name of the current GameState class.

You can also see changes to these values and the events that occurred in the run-up to the error as breadcrumbs.

Integrations

Streamline debugging workflows with powerful integrations.

There are pre-built integrations with the tools your team already uses, like Slack, PagerDuty and 2-way issue tracker integration with Jira, Pivotal, and more.

Automation can help streamline your debugging workflows and drive code ownership so you can quickly roll out fixes and minimize further impact to user experience.

Get Started With Bugsnag

Bugsnag’s new notifier library for Unreal Engine initially supports Android and iOS games.

Simply create a new Unreal Engine project and follow the quick start guide in our documentation to start monitoring your application.

If you’re new to Bugsnag, start a14-day free trial or request a demo to see the capabilities of our stability management platform in action.