Previously, we saw that the game keeps a pair of debug logs on the player’s device. Back in the late 1990s when were did this for King of Dragon Pass, we asked players to navigate to those files (with Finder or Windows Explorer), and send them.
When I adapted King of Dragon Pass for iOS, I had to use a different approach (since the files aren’t accessible). Luckily, iOS had an easy way to send an email message, and we were using Fogbugz to do bug tracking. So the game let the player mail in a report (to the special Fogbugz address), automatically attaching the log, as well as the most recent saved game.
In Six Ages, I’ve improved that slightly, compressing the files into a ZIP archive, and including a few other debug files that help with tuning.
I’m also detecting certain kinds of crashes, and offering to email the report. (In this case, I take a screen shot and include that in the ZIP file.)
Since some crashes prevent this, I also try to detect a crash on the next launch, and offer to send the report then.
This is all fairly trivial code (I’m not using one of the third party libraries that no doubt do a much better job with edge cases), but it makes sending the debug info much simpler for the player. Which makes fixing the bug much easier for me.
When can we beta test? The stars are falling
When it hits beta…