Scene change code works in the unity editor but not when built

I am making a game with multiple scenes and in one of them, there is more than one place the player can enter the scene from. To handle this I have some code that checks the door the player came in from and sets the player’s position to the door that they should enter from because of that. This is done with a list variable of all the spawn points in that level and an int variable that chooses the index of that list to move the player to. It looks like this:

player.transform.position = spawnPoints[LevelManagment.doorIndex].position;

This is run in an awake function.
In the editor, it works semi-consistently. Every now and then it seems to completely bypass this code and put the player where they start in the editor. One trick I have found while working in the editor is to simply reload the scene, click on a new scene and come back, and that gets it working. However, no matter what I do I can’t get this to work in the built version of the game. It still works half the time, but much more often keeps the player at their original start point with no error message in the console.

I am aware of issues with the order scripts are executed in unity and have messed around with the level management, putting it before the other scripts and after them but neither worked.

I also tried writing it as:

spawnPoint = spawnPoints[LevelManagment.doorIndex].position;
player.transform.position = spawnPoint;

This should do anything in theory but idk, I am really lost, any help is appreciated.

EDIT: I solved it, for anyone else facing this issue it is solved in this discussion:

I’m guessing you’re just throwing some kind of error on device. Have you looked at the logs?

You must find a way to get the information you need in order to reason about what the problem is.

What is often happening in these cases is one of the following:

  • the code you think is executing is not actually executing at all
  • the code is executing far EARLIER or LATER than you think
  • the code is executing far LESS OFTEN than you think
  • the code is executing far MORE OFTEN than you think
  • the code is executing on another GameObject than you think it is
  • you’re getting an error or warning and you haven’t noticed it in the console window

To help gain more insight into your problem, I recommend liberally sprinkling Debug.Log() statements through your code to display information in realtime.

Doing this should help you answer these types of questions:

  • is this code even running? which parts are running? how often does it run? what order does it run in?
  • what are the values of the variables involved? Are they initialized? Are the values reasonable?
  • are you meeting ALL the requirements to receive callbacks such as triggers / colliders (review the documentation)

Knowing this information will help you reason about the behavior you are seeing.

You can also supply a second argument to Debug.Log() and when you click the message, it will highlight the object in scene, such as Debug.Log("Problem!",this);

If your problem would benefit from in-scene or in-game visualization, Debug.DrawRay() or Debug.DrawLine() can help you visualize things like rays (used in raycasting) or distances.

You can also call Debug.Break() to pause the Editor when certain interesting pieces of code run, and then study the scene manually, looking for all the parts, where they are, what scripts are on them, etc.

You can also call GameObject.CreatePrimitive() to emplace debug-marker-ish objects in the scene at runtime.

You could also just display various important quantities in UI Text elements to watch them change as you play the game.

If you are running a mobile device you can also view the console output. Google for how on your particular mobile target, such as this answer or iOS: How To - Capturing Device Logs on iOS or this answer for Android: How To - Capturing Device Logs on Android

Another useful approach is to temporarily strip out everything besides what is necessary to prove your issue. This can simplify and isolate compounding effects of other items in your scene or prefab.

Here’s an example of putting in a laser-focused Debug.Log() and how that can save you a TON of time wallowing around speculating what might be going wrong: