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mattfox12
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« on: March 30, 2010, 07:39:48 PM » |
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I've had the idea for a while now to somehow include Google Analytics into games for some in-depth tracking of player use, etc. The idea being that I could see how many people play each day, where they made it to, items found, etc.
Has anyone here done that before? Are there API's for this already (outside of the Google possibility)?
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Skofo
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« Reply #1 on: March 30, 2010, 08:51:51 PM » |
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If you are making Flash games, you should look into Mochi Analytics and the Newgrounds Flash API. I have not used either of them. |
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If you wish to make a video game from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
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aeiowu
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« Reply #2 on: March 30, 2010, 08:55:50 PM » |
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i've heard swfstats is the tops. seems pretty full-featured and customizable: http://www.swfstats.com/ |
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Hima
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« Reply #3 on: March 30, 2010, 09:23:22 PM » |
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What about non-flash game? Is there any API that does the same thing or you have to roll yourown?
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mattfox12
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« Reply #4 on: March 31, 2010, 06:28:13 AM » |
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Thanks, great suggestions. Any iPhone ones out there?
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benologist
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« Reply #6 on: March 31, 2010, 12:38:53 PM » |
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Thank for the plug.  Matt SWFStats does pretty much everything you're looking for. I've put a lot of emphasis on being flexible and letting people define what's important to their game themselves. You can have custom metrics which can track things like who skips a tutorial or clicks a button or plays in whatever language or difficulty mode, then you have another suite of metrics that gather data on a per-level basis to help you really follow what's happening when people are playing. There's also progress goals which is something I'm still actively working on to get just right, they help you identify where people reach in your game and at what point they abandon it. The API is only available in ActionScript 3, it's very easy to integrate. You can log pretty much anything with a single line of code, eg Log.CustomMetric("Did something"); |
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Skofo
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« Reply #7 on: March 31, 2010, 04:12:15 PM » |
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Matt SWFStats does pretty much everything you're looking for. Except the fact that it's not for the iPhone?  |
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If you wish to make a video game from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
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benologist
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« Reply #8 on: March 31, 2010, 04:47:18 PM » |
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Buy me an iphone and I'll work something out heh. The logging component of my API is very simple, you could implement that in objective-c or possibly it'll work through CS5's publish-to-flash stuff although I think there's some parts of the Flash API that aren't supported. I'm not really familiar with iPhones or how analytics data is collected on a not-necessarily-connected device. |
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moi
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« Reply #9 on: March 31, 2010, 08:03:09 PM » |
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I think Flash is the only platform where you can realistically pull this off(and well all online plugins, such as java, etc)
I've heard you might get into trouble on Iphone if you try to transmit user data.
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subsystems subsystems subsystems
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benologist
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« Reply #10 on: April 01, 2010, 01:19:03 AM » |
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I'm not sure. There are I think some concerns that don't necessarily apply to Flash, but there are existing platforms for app analytics - http://www.google.com/search?q=iphone+analytics - so I guess the concerns I can think of (privacy to some extent, data usage on potentially very expensive plans, connected/disconnected/local storage to send later) have been addressed. |
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mattfox12
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« Reply #11 on: April 01, 2010, 06:38:39 AM » |
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I definitely like the look and ease of swfstats. As for adding it to an iPhone game, I read through some other comments/forums and think I will hold off on iPhone for now. Too polarizing currently. I think the ideal situation for doing such reporting would be through an existing and trusted opt-in community like Openfeint. So if swfstats and Openfeint team up, I think we'd have something pretty interesting  |
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X3N
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« Reply #12 on: April 01, 2010, 08:04:10 AM » |
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I definitely like the look and ease of swfstats. As for adding it to an iPhone game, I read through some other comments/forums and think I will hold off on iPhone for now. Too polarizing currently. I think the ideal situation for doing such reporting would be through an existing and trusted opt-in community like Openfeint. So if swfstats and Openfeint team up, I think we'd have something pretty interesting Isn't that user data just restricted to real-world information etc? 99% sure I've heard of devs using PinchMedia or the like for stat-tracking. I think ngmoco mentioned in an interview that Rolando players played an average of 2mins per session. |
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destiny is truth pre-op
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benologist
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« Reply #13 on: April 01, 2010, 10:55:42 AM » |
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OpenFeint looks really cool. If/when I'm able to move in an iPhone direction I'll definitely get in touch with them. In cool news that Steambirds game that's on the front page at the moment is using SWFStats. Andy's got the public reports enabled which shows some of the data - http://public.swfstats.com/146-181/Default.aspx |
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Developer
