How to Plan a Post-mortem

Planning a post-mortem is mostly about making sure it produces something actionable. At its core, a post-mortem is an honest review of what broke and why, grounded in captured data not memory. Run without capture, it generates impressions; run with capture, it generates a ranked list of real failures. That difference is the whole point. This guide covers how to plan a post-mortem so it pays off: Walk the captured failures and timeline, find the root causes, and decide what to harden.

Planning a post-mortem

The purpose of a post-mortem is clear once you state it: it is an honest review of what broke and why, grounded in captured data not memory. Planning it well means setting it up to produce data you can act on. Walk the captured failures and timeline, find the root causes, and decide what to harden. The most common mistake is running the activity without capture, so it surfaces a feeling that “something broke around there” instead of a specific, reproducible failure.

So the first planning decision is to run a post-mortem with automatic crash capture on. Then every failure it provokes is recorded with its stack trace, the build, the device, and the breadcrumb trail — which turns the activity from a source of impressions into a source of fixes.

Why “it works on my machine” is a trap

Your development machine is the single least representative device your game will ever run on. It is the one configuration guaranteed to work, because you built and tested the game on it. Your players live out on the long tail of GPUs, drivers, operating-system versions, resolutions, and background software, and that long tail is exactly where the failures you never reproduce are hiding.

This is why local testing, however thorough, has a hard ceiling. You cannot own every device, and you cannot imagine every combination. Field data closes that gap by letting the failures come to you with the configuration attached, so a crash that only happens on one driver version stops being a mystery and becomes a one-line filter.

Turning a pile of crashes into a ranked worklist

Raw crash data is overwhelming if every occurrence is its own line. The trick is grouping: identical failures, fingerprinted by their stack trace, collapse into one issue with a count. Suddenly the question “what should I fix first?” answers itself, because the bug hitting the most players sits at the top with the biggest number next to it.

That ordering is what makes a small team effective. You are never going to fix everything, but you do not have to. Fixing the top few signatures usually removes the large majority of real-world failures, and prioritising by frequency means your limited hours always go to the bug that matters most right now.

Connecting failures to the build that caused them

Regressions are the cruelest class of bug because they punish your most engaged players — the ones who already own the game and updated to your newest patch. A change meant to improve things quietly breaks something else, and without build-level tracking you have no way to link the dip in retention to the release that caused it.

The fix is to attach a build identifier to every captured failure. Then a new signature that appears the day you ship a patch is unmistakable, and you can roll back or hotfix while only a few players are affected instead of discovering the problem weeks later in your reviews.

Turning it into fixes

With capture on, a post-mortem produces a worklist rather than a vibe. Group identical failures so the highest-impact one is on top, read its trace and breadcrumbs, fix the root, and tie failures to builds so you can confirm it. Because you always work the biggest-impact failure first, the activity pays off fast.

Make it part of a loop. a Post-mortem is most valuable when its findings flow straight into fixes you verify against the next build, rather than into a document no one revisits. Plan it that way — capture, group, fix, verify — and it becomes a reliable way to make the game more stable, not just a box you ticked.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every failure automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds identical failures into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it happened on. The result is that the abstract idea above stops being theory and becomes a ranked list you work down — the worst problem first, verified fixed when its signature disappears from the next release.

Most of the failures hurting your game are silent. The first job is making them visible; the fixes get a lot easier after that.