At my new job, I was handed a baffling problem to debug. When a player would try to logout out of the game, the player’s character would go in this new dimension where everything was black except for the player’s character and the UI.

This bug was only on the Android platform and very hard to reproduce. When I started to reproduce this I had a feeling that this problem was caused as a result of how the players were touching the logout button. After trying to reproduce the bug, soon I gave up.

My seniors set me up with tools to draw a trace and figure out the problem. Using these stack tracing tools and different debugging practices I found out the problem.

The login button was right underneath the logout button. Though the login button was not active, if the logout button is pressed in the correct spot, it would log the player out and then hit the login button. This would log the player in immediately, without initializing the game world properly.

So my experience did hint me to the root of the problem but without the right tools, I could have never figured it out and solved the problem.

Even an adept butcher will have trouble at his craft with an ax.

Find the right tools and any task will feel like a hot ax through butter.