Hi — I built Argus so my games ship faster

I'm a solo game dev. Before every release I'd do the same ritual: build to a shelf of test phones, attach the profiler, replay the same levels, squint at frame graphs, and copy numbers into a spreadsheet I'd lose by next sprint. And somewhere in there a regression always slipped through — I'd find out from a player, not a graph.

I got tired of it and built the tool I actually wanted. Argus watches my game's performance across every build and tells me what got slower — automatically, on real devices, before players do.

That's the whole pitch. Here's what's in the box today.

Real-device data, not the editor

The editor lies. It has a beefy CPU, a desktop GPU, and none of my players' thermal limits. Argus captures frame time, memory, GPU, and draw calls from the actual phones players hold — a mid-range Android tells a very different story than my dev machine, and that's the story that ships.

Know what got slower — in one click

Every playtest is saved, so the baseline is always there. I pick two builds and Argus shows the delta: FPS, frame time, memory, draw calls — green where it improved, red where it regressed. "Did last week's lighting change cost me 4ms?" is now a tab-switch, not a bisect.

I can even compare the same test across two devices — is the boss fight slower on the Pixel than the iPhone? Now I know which one to open a profiler on.

It points at the code

A spike that just says "87ms" tells me nothing. Argus tags each spike with the region, scene, and subsystem that caused it — so I see "this frame was script-bound in EnemyAI during the arena wave," not just a red bar. I wrap a hot path in one line:

using (Argus.Region("Pathfinding")) {
    // the code I actually suspect
}

…and it shows up on the timeline, attributed. There's also a Unity-Profiler-style frame timeline right in the browser: CPU subsystems stacked, GPU and memory panes below, scrub to any frame. No cable, no "which device am I attached to again."

The freezes players actually feel

Crashes get all the attention, but the thing that gets you one-starred is the freeze — the two seconds where nothing responds. Argus catches ANRs and hangs and ties each one to the scene, region, and frame it happened on. It reads thermal and battery state too, so a "slow" capture that was really the device throttling gets flagged as exactly that. There's a stability view that trends the ANR rate against the store threshold — so I see trouble coming before the store does.

It fits the way I already work

• One line to instrument. Drop the package in, mark the moments that matter, ship.
• Several devices at once — a whole test shelf streams into one dashboard, live.
• WebGL, iOS, Android — dev builds and real players in the wild.
• Alerts in Slack or Discord the moment a build regresses.
• AI that reads a capture for me — I point Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor at a session and get a plain-English "here's what's slow and why."

An honest note

Argus doesn't replace your deep profiler, and it won't fix the regression for you. What it does is find it and point at it in seconds — so the profiler session I do open is aimed at the right frame, on the right device, on the right build. That's the boring 90% of perf work I wanted to delete.

Where it's going

I built Argus on Unity first because that's where I work. But performance regressions aren't a Unity problem — they're a game-engine problem. Unreal support is already in testing, with an alpha and a native Unreal demo landing soon. Same idea, twice the engines.

Try the live demo (a real game streaming real profiling data into a public dashboard), or drop the package into your project and send your first capture in about ten minutes. Free to start, no card.

Thanks for reading. Now go find out what got slower. 👁️