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Tech Lead Responsibilities

Bygoktugulvan@gmail.com

As a Tech Lead, your role shifts from just fixing bugs to architecting the systems that allow your team to find and fix bugs efficiently. In game development, bugs are often transient (happening for 1/60th of a second), visual, or physics-based, which makes standard breakpoints less effective.

Here is a guide on how to set up a debugging infrastructure specifically for a Game Tech Lead.

1. Mandate an In-Game “Debug Console” / Cheat Menu

You cannot rely on the Engine Editor for everything. You need a runtime system that works in built versions (exes/APIs) for QA and testers.

  • The Concept: A hidden overlay (toggled by tilde ~ or a specific touch gesture) that exposes internal variables.
  • What it must do:
    • God Mode / No Clip: Let QA fly through walls to get to the bug location instantly.
    • Teleport: Jump to specific levels or coordinates.
    • Timescale Slider: Ability to set Time.timeScale to 0.1. This allows you to watch physics interactions or animation blending in slow motion to catch frame-perfect glitches.
    • State Override: Force specific game states (e.g., ForceWin, AddGold, SpawnBoss).
  • Tech Stack: Use SRDebugger (Unity) or ImGui (Unreal/General C++). ImGui is the industry standard for lightweight, immediate-mode debug UIs.

2. Implement Visual Debugging Tools (Gizmos)

Text logs are useless for physics and AI bugs. You need to see what the math is doing. The Tech Lead should enforce a library of “Debug Draw” functions that only compile in Development Builds.

  • Hitboxes: Draw wireframes around collision boxes (Red = Enemy, Green = Player).
  • Raycasts: Draw lines showing where the AI is “looking” or where a bullet is traveling.
  • Pathfinding: Draw the A* path the enemy intends to take.
  • Vectors: Visualize velocity and normals. If a character slides off a slope, you need to see the Normal Vector of the ground to know why.

3. Solve “It Works in Editor, Breaks in Build”

The most common headache. The Editor has overhead, different memory management, and uncompressed assets. The Build does not.

  • Attach to Process: Ensure your build pipeline creates “Development Builds” (Unity) or “DebugGame” configs (Unreal). These builds allow you to attach Visual Studio / Rider to the running .exe to hit breakpoints.
  • Remote Logging: Use a tool like UberLogger or a custom TCP socket logger. If a tester finds a bug on an iPad, you should be able to see the real-time console logs on your PC over the local Wi-Fi.
  • Script Stripping: Be wary of the engine removing code it thinks is unused (Reflection). This causes crashes in builds that don’t happen in the editor.

4. Input Recording (Deterministic Debugging)

If your game relies heavily on physics or complex inputs (fighting games, RTS), you need a “Replay System.”

  • The Strategy: Instead of recording a video, record the Inputs + Random Seed + DeltaTime per frame.
  • The Fix: When a bug occurs, the tester sends you a small JSON/Binary file. You load that file, and the engine “plays” the game exactly as they played it. You can now pause, scrub, and inspect the code at the exact moment the bug happened.

5. Network Simulation (The “Lag” Switch)

Developers usually test on localhost with 0ms ping. Real players have packet loss.

  • Clumsy (Windows) / Network Link Conditioner (Mac): Force your team to use these tools. They simulate bad internet at the system level.
  • Engine Tools: Unity and Unreal have built-in network simulators to inject latency and packet drop.
  • Tech Lead Rule: Code must be written assuming packets will arrive out of order. If your weapon firing code breaks at 200ms ping, it’s a bug, not a network issue.

6. The “Frame 1” Captures (RenderDoc & PIX)

If you have graphical glitches (flickering textures, weird shaders), Debug.Log won’t help.

  • RenderDoc: This is the industry standard open-source graphics debugger. It captures a single frame and lets you inspect the GPU pipeline draw-call by draw-call.
  • What to look for: You can see exactly which textures were bound, the vertex buffer data, and why an object is rendering black (e.g., “Oh, the lighting data wasn’t sent to the GPU this frame”).

7. Automated Crash Reporting (Sentry / Crashlytics)

You cannot rely on users to email you screenshots.

  • Integration: Integrate Sentry, Bugsnag, or Unity Cloud Diagnostics.
  • Symbolication: As a Tech Lead, you must ensure your build pipeline uploads the Symbol Files (.pdb / .dSYM) to the crash reporting dashboard. Without symbols, a crash report is just memory addresses (hex code). With symbols, it tells you exactly which line of C# or C++ caused the crash.

8. Memory Profiling (The Silent Killer)

Games crash when they run out of RAM, often without throwing an error exception.

  • Snapshot Comparison: Teach your team to take a memory snapshot in the Profiler, play the level, unload the level, and take another snapshot.
  • The Leak: If the number of textures or material instances is higher in the second snapshot, you have a memory leak.
  • Garbage Collection (GC) Spikes: In C# (Unity), watch for spikes in CPU usage caused by the Garbage Collector. As a Tech Lead, you should enforce coding standards that avoid memory allocation in the Update() loop (e.g., reusing Lists instead of creating new List() every frame).

Summary Checklist for the Tech Lead

  1. ImGui / Cheat Menu integrated?
  2. Debug Drawing helpers created?
  3. Crash Reporting hooked up with Symbolication?
  4. Network Conditioners installed on dev machines?
  5. RenderDoc verified working with the build?
  6.  

Lessons from a Tech Lead: Roles, responsibilities, and words of advice

Delegating Effectively as a Tech Lead