Finally, Metrics, Analytics and A/B Testing for your GameSalad apps, free and simple

Hopscotch

With the addition of network functionality to GameSalad, we finally have the ability to interact with our apps and evaluate possible improvements for our users.

In the spirit of GameSalad (game creation for everyone), we have been developing, simplifying and testing for the last three months to make analytics accessible to all.

With only six behaviours in your app, you can already track your currently active users, number of sessions over time, how your marketing campaigns perform by comparing new and returning users, etc.

Adding further metric detail, messages, A/B tests or event driven triggers is a snap.

If you are Pro, then it can be used with any of the new nightly releases, release candidates and the upcoming version 0.11.

If you are interested, visit the link to APPFORMATIVE in the signature.

Pricing

The service is completely free, no surprises. No subscriptions, contracts or credit card details to tie you in. We do limit the data points collected to 25 000 per app per month. You will not automatically be tied into any subscription or fees if you cross this threshold.

What about privacy of my users?

We create our own user IDs, we do not transmit any user or device specific data. GameSalad does not make this available. Therefore, the tracking is completely anonymous.

Even the location based data is only able to accurately identify the user by country. Further detail is not reliably possible due to the nature of mobile connectivity. Actual GeoData is not accessible at this point.

What if I prefer my to host my own server and do my own analysis?

For those who prefer to set up and maintain their own server, I can point you to the excellent headway that @StormyStudio and @jonmulcahy are making. Read up under the following threads
http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/64039/creating-your-own-asynchronous-server
and
http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/63636/sending-and-receiving-data-using-your-own-sql-server-php-file-and-testproject-included

Happy digging,
Roland

“42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.” Steven Wright
Don’t be that guy/girl

Doguz

Just had a look and registered. looks interesting. are you saying we can broadcast messages to our apps?

Hopscotch

@Doguz, not in the sense of notifications, but you can configure, for example a "Message of the Day", which then gets picked up by the game and can be displayed in game where ever you choose.

Doguz

Thats Awesome, I'll be testing this for sure. @Hopscotch your site is in English but has quite a few grammar errors in it. Do you need some help with it?

Hopscotch

@Doguz, with pleasure, feel free to send corrections to the contact email on the site. I would be grateful. Coding is my first language

Braydon_SFX

Wow... This is interesting! I'll take a read...

quantumsheep

I don't have time to get into this right now but I did like the way you phrased your costs:

Free
per App per calendar month
No subscription, no hidden costs

Hopscotch

@quantumsheep, if you have used other analytics companies, and read their fine print, you will know why I explicitly reiterate that point. I guess I can present it less weird.

jamie_c

Looks like pretty cool stuff, nice work.

sawkastee

I registered and read through the materials on the site on how to get it working. It seems fairly simple. My app is at the begining of it's development cycle so I won't be adding this anytime soon. Can someone who does this let us know how it works for them? I'd love to hear some first impressions.

Hopscotch

@uptimistik, @braydon_sfx, @jamie_c, thanks for the words, hope it is of use. Heavily expanding on the reporting side.

The "insides" have been well established for a while and are quite extensible from the server side, without the need to change anything on the apps.

Lots of extras are coming.

StormyStudio

This looks really very cool and well put together.

Well done Hopscotch very impressive.

Good luck with it...

Hopscotch

Thanks @StormyStudio!

bravery

Hello Hopscotch,

Sound interesting, I will give it a try with my latest release game, and see how it goes.

Doguz

Im going to give this a go right now, but a question before I start. Well a request really. I'm really interested in the custom message feature of your setup. If Im thinking of say putting together an app for a 'shop'. It would need to have current prices etc. These need to be up to date and there would be many prices in the pricelist.

What is the likelihood that you could extend the message capabilities so that we could add more or even unlimited messages for our apps. Where a single message could be a single price for an item.

If you build this, then that is a service I'd pay for.

Love your front end and could see it very easy to maintain. I am interested in your thoughts on this.

Hopscotch

@Doguz, the communication part is very easy to extend, without affecting existing implementations.

What you are asking is on the list, like me to speed it up?

The message system could be abused for this now with a lot of string manipulation in GS, but you and surely others would want proper customizable table contents to be send to the client.

You can mail me a breakdown of a possible table structure that you have in mind so I can see if my generic approach covers it as planned.

And thank you for the kind comments.

Also, have a look at this thread and plz give me some comments.

http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/67068/your-thoughts-on-time-and-location-sensitive-leaderboards

bravery

Hi Hopscotch,

I'm reading now the implementation section, and in the "Event Tracking" I notice that we need to create an event (at your site) and then we need to change table value (step 2), now I have a question:

I notice that you are advising to select raw = 1 and column = 1 to the first value, so the question is: if I have a second and third values what should be the values of the raw and columns for the second and the third values?

Thanks.

Hopscotch

Hi @bravery,

the simplified tutorials assume that you will send off the event, as in Step

If you have a second event you would just repeat those identical 3 steps.

The tutorial on caching a set of events and sending later is in the works.

bravery

Thanks for the reply

cant wait cor the second tutorial

Doguz

I've got the both the RC (11.0.6) and the Daily (.254) running, but I can't see any network behaviours. Were they taken off?

Doguz

This would be awesome if you could build this functionality.

Rows would be added as you make them.!

And the edit screen.

And we would refer to the row number in our GS rules.

bravery

Hi Hopscotch,

I'm little confused between:

1- the event tracking: http://www.appformative.com/implementation_gamesalad_events.mox

and
2- Custom event trigger:
http://www.appformative.com/implementation_gamesalad_triggers.mox

Can you please explain what is the difference between both of them?

Also Can I define some custom events and track them like:

• Gameplay ends
• Player uses power-up earned in game
• User taps leaderboard
• User served an Ad
• User taps on "Buy" to initiate purchase
• User confirms purchase and account credited
• User shares activity to twitter

So what is the best practice to track these events or triggers?

Hopscotch

@Doguz, on the project info screen you need to select "My own server" from the Multiplayer drop down. Then you will have the Networking tab in the creator.

To your suggestion about Messages, I have something like that implemented that includes an item id, item name, description, price and special indicator. Will keep you informed as to when its in. This week still.

Hopscotch

@bravery, what you listed are events you wish to track. This can be done through the event tracking.

Event triggers are triggers which you can communicate to the app. This can, for example, be used to trigger the easter season in your app, displaying easter themed menus, etc.

The "Event" in "event triggers" probably needs a new name not to cause confusion.

bravery

Hello Hopscotch,

I have finilize the setup of the analytics, and run my game, and when I tried to check the active user dashboard I got the following error:

Data column(s) for axis #0 cannot be of type string×

Why is that? I'm sure that I follow all your steps correctly.

Hopscotch

@bravery, how soon after did you check the graph?

The data can take a minute to be live.

The message you get is if there is no data yet. It will get prettied up.

bravery

Yes now I can see some data

Hopscotch

@bravery, it would be better to send me questions to the contact email address on the website. I will be able to respond sooner that way.

I will update this thread if it is of interest to everyone.

Keen to see how you come along.

bravery

Hopscotch,

No problem, I already send to you an email.

Thanks.

wanegroup

@Hopscotch - Loving realtime user stats in my first GS game! Nice work!

alex_blue

@Hopscotch‌ This service has been great. Question though, while adhocing my app I've been having troubles updating my "message of the day". For example, originally on my appformative account I have the MoTD to be "hi," this appears in my app. Then within my appformative account I change the MoTD to "bye," the message doesn't change within my app. In fact it doesnt even change when I force quit and reset the app. Help please?