How to Decide Between Nightly and Per-PR Builds

Per-PR full builds are too slow; nightly-only builds catch breakage too late. The answer is both, scoped differently. Here is how to split them.

How to fix it

1. Fast checks on PRs

Run vet, unit tests, and a single-platform build on every PR so authors get feedback in minutes.

2. Heavy matrix nightly

Run the full multi-platform, packaged, long-test pipeline once a night and alert on failures.

3. Promote known-good builds

Tag the last green nightly as the candidate for QA so testers always pull a verified build.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.