I work in an area where unit testing is, generally speaking, more effort than its worth (game programming -- the state space is generally too huge for unit test

I work in an area where unit testing is, generally speaking, more effort than its worth (game programming -- the state space is generally too huge for unit tests to be really practical). So I can't really comment on the effectiveness of them, other than to say that yes, they are different. Typically, instead of unit tests, I write state tracking and visualization code. This goes a long way towards helping track down bugs and keeping me out of the debugger, but honestly, a lot of that is just an indication of debugging tools being crap in general.