In-Game Bug Reporter Best Practices

Give each report a player-facing unique ID

Players have often used the in-game bug reporter and then followed up about it in Discord. By showing them a copy-pastable unique ID after submitting a report, they can use it when asking for more help or adding info.

"Hey I submitted a report via the in-game bug reporter, ID 12345, I found out that I can repro the bug by making a ship with 3 people as well as with 5 people."

Reporter confirmation screen with ID:

Filter by game version

As your game changes, older versions will be deprecated and replaced with newer ones. You will continue to get bug reports from users who are still playing old versions. Those are not useful for QA, so you will need to be able to filter reports by game version.

I would recommend your game version information include the repository version number so programmers can know whether a particular bugfix would be included in a build.

Filter gross comments

Players will be frustrated by bugs and some will take to foul language. QA's job is to help identify bugs in the game, not to be abused or read hate-speech, so you will need to filter any comments with hateful content.

Make reports searchable

This might seem optional, but it's incredibly useful to be able to search reports to find if multiple players are seeing the same issue, or when an issue started to appear.

Translate all reports into your QA's language

Hopefully you will be releasing your game in multiple languages, which means you will be getting bug reports in multiple languages too!

QA can manually copy-paste text into a translation services but it's a huge time-sink and is really boring.

There are a bunch of online automated translation services that are reasonably-priced, and will help QA make the best of all the reports you will be receiving.

Allow optional user ID

Some users may wish to know workarounds, or be willing to supply more informaiton on request. Give them the option of supplying an email address or Discord username for this.

Further Reading

• Tech Toolbox: Subnautica's Feedback System *
• For crash reporting, check out BugSplat
• Getting Unreal Crash Reports with BugSplat