Live Analytics from my game

fugufish · 11-21-2011, 10:27 AM

I wrote an iOS version of my game, Private Joe. It was featured on FreeAppADay, got like 15k downloads/day for a couple days straight. Didn't pay a dime for it, didn't make a dime either

here are some insights that I gained from my players (I used Playtomic)

Background of my game

Private Joe is a 2d platform shooter. You play a soldier and try to eliminate enemies with various weapons. Gain coins, badges and powerups along the way.

Metric #1 - Beginnings and Deaths

Blue line: steep player drop rates right after Levels 1 and 6.

I knew immediately why most players left after Level 1 : the user flow was horrible! The missions menu was poorly designed.
Most players couldn't progress beyond Level 6 because too many died there!

Orange line: most players get killed in levels 5, 6 and 10.

Note: I excluded Level 10's deaths because it's a boss level. I shall write a separate article about boss level analytics soon

What I didn't expect was a high number of players dying in Levels 5 and 6. I had to investigate the cause of this! First thing that comes to mind is to record the x,y coordinates where players die frequently, and plot this over the level map. Enter heatmaps!

Metric #2 - Heatmaps

Level 6 Heatmap

Some definitions:

StartPosition (Purple box) : Spawn position of player at start of level
WeaponBazooka : Collecting this unlocks the Bazooka for the player
RefuelStation: A checkpoint to emit messages ( not important here )
Ger_schutzer: Basic enemy soldier
Ger_captain: Advanced enemy soldier
Ger_tank2: Advanced enemy tank

Notice the two colorful spots in Level 6. The first (300,200) is green-bluish, signaling a lower intensity of deaths. The killer is the 2nd, more colorful one near (600,200). What could be the reason?

The enemy tank packs a powerful punch. Getting hit by a tank shell gives 3x more damage than a regular bullet from an enemy soldier. Most players die fighting the 2nd tank, because their lives were reduced too much after fighting the 1st tank. Having two health packs after the 1st tank didn't seem to help much.

To reduce death numbers, I could add more healthpacks, reduce tank damage, remove the soldiers, remove the 2nd tank, etc... the options are endless for the game designer. Without analytics, I wouldn't have considered them!

Metric #3 - Favourite weapons purchased

Appears that the rifle (blue) is the favourite weapon, followed by the pistol (orange). Ironically, these were the two weapons I spent the LEAST development time making. I poured most time into making fancy Machine Gun recoils, Grenade mechanics and Bazooka explosion effects. Bummer.

Does that mean I wasted precious dev juice doing unimportant things? No. I just had to tweak the other 7 weapons to make sure they're utilized more. This can mean: increasing firepower for the big guns, reducing the prices ( players need coins to purchase weapons ) or giving players more "trial bullets" to begin with.

Summary

Analytics opened up a whole new world for me. When done properly, it tells so much about the players!

EDIT: more metrics in the reply

Let me know what other metrics you'd like to see, and if I should write other posts as well.

fugufish · 11-21-2011, 10:31 AM

here's two additional metrics from my game...

Metric #4 - Favourite menu items

I expected most players to click on the "Store" button and it turned out right! Players need to spend the coins gained from defeating enemies.

It appears that initially, the "Objectives" and "How to play" links got a lot of clicks because players were figuring out how to play. To placate this effect, I added a simple tutorial that pops up the moment players start Level 1.

Over time, more players cared about the Store and Inventory, possibly due to low bullet count. Opportunity rings! I could implement a 12 or 24-hour return bonus that awards free bullets if players come back to play.

Metric #5 - Free vs. Paid

As a kid, I always hated the "INSERT CREDIT TO CONTINUE" screen in arcades. Just couldn't afford all the quarters it took to finish Asterix and Obelix.

To encourage players with zero lives to continue playing, I offered them two choices:

buy 8 lives for 80 coins, then respawn at the nearest checkpoint
take the free life, but respawn all the way back at the starting point

Free life" won by majority. The upside? Some people are willing to pay for lives, because it provides value: you don't need to respawn from the beginning, PLUS you won't get nagged at for at least the next 8 deaths!

morpheus · 11-26-2011, 05:23 PM

That's pretty slick - thanks for sharing!

How did you get FAAD to feature it without paying $$$?

Jhsuhsuhsu · 12-02-2011, 01:11 AM

This is all really fascinating stuff! We just launched our game, with Flurry Analytics. It was suggested by someone I knew and so we implemented it, but I am just realized how incredibly important this information is (not to mention how fun it is to track all the user events and flow live!).

Question for you: How did you decide what kind of metrics to capture beforehand? It seems like you can have a crazy variety and depth to what events you set up. Ours currently tracks what items are opened in the store/purchased/not-purchased, as well as performance in the game (victory, game over, user cancelled, etc).

And another question, what analytics package are you using?