Out of the box, Unity Analytics is something you should have on anytime you release a game. It is essential to provide feedback about your players, the distribution of your game, and many other metrics. We will cover some of the basics of Unity Analytics in this section and then take a quick deep dive into using the tool to track critical errors and exceptions. Being able to access this information will provide you with better support for your game during off-site testing or release.

Follow the given instructions to enable Unity Analytics on your project:

The Unity Analytics project page

Right now, your players, sessions, and other metrics will likely be sitting at 0. This is expected since you likely just enabled analytics on your project. Now, by itself, Unity Analytics won't track logging messages, but we can use some of the custom event mechanisms to track errors or exception logs. Fortunately, all the work for this has been encapsulated into a script called AnalyticsLogHandler.

Follow the given directions to set up this script:

Let's take a look at the AnalyticsLogHandler script, as illustrated:

using UnityEngine; 
using UnityEngine.Analytics; 
 
public class AnlyticsLogHandler : MonoBehaviour 
{ 
    public LogType logLevel = LogType.Error; 
    void Awake() 
    { 
        Application.logMessageReceived += Application_logMessageReceived; 
    } 
 
    private void Application_logMessageReceived(string condition, string stackTrace, LogType type) 
    { 
        if (type == logLevel) 
        { 
            Analytics.CustomEvent("LOG", new Dictionary<string, object> 
            { 
                { "msg", condition }, 
                { "type", type.ToString() } 
            }); 
        } 
    } 
} 

This script is simpler, but the implementation is similar to the CustomLogHandler script we looked at earlier. There is one major difference and that is the use of the Analytics object to create a CustomEvent that then automatically gets sent to Unity Analytics. In this case, we are using the method to track logging messages or other error conditions. Of course, you could add that snippet of code anywhere you wanted to track a custom event in your game.

Once you start collecting custom events, be it from errors or other regular game activity, you can plot these metrics against other metrics. For instance, you could plot the number of errors per user or as per the number of game sessions, which would tell you how critical or benign an error is and how quickly you may need to respond. Setting up those plots is outside the scope of this book but worth some investigation on the Unity site when you have time to do so.

As you saw, analytics can be a great tool for not only tracking player activity, but also other activities, such as errors or other custom events. In the next and final section of the book, we will look at other issues you may have encountered during the course of this book, with possible solutions, of course.