Despite our best intentions, our programs will likely crash at one point or another. If this has happened on your own machine then you have your debugger at hand, but if it has happened on a user’s device this becomes more problematic.
A solution for this is crash reporting: a crash dump which is sent to you for debugging, as well as any relevant log files.
One of the issues I’ve regularly had during game development is to find a font that has the exact style I am looking for but is missing variants, e.g. comes in Regular but not Bold.
While working on Hyperscape, I’ve found Arcon and after a few tests, decided it looked good across multiple user interface elements and would make for a solid base font in the game.
However, this font only comes in the Regular weight.
Rather than just discarding the font, I thought I’d try to create a Bold variant. I must say I had expected the process of making a Bold variant to be completely beyond my ability: I’m a programmer after all, and the idea of editing each individual glyph did not appeal.
No matter what game we are making, robust logging is essential. It is an essential tool for the developer (and for more technical players), assisting both during development and after a game is release.
My custom C++ engine, Genesis, has had a logging from the earliest days, but it has received some upgrades recently to make it easier to use. I thought it might be helpful to other developers to write an article about the considerations which go into writing such a system, as well as share some code snippets.