Hevn has gone through a few iterations technologically, as Larry stays up with the latest release of the Unity engine. Sometimes this is a real chore, as you can read about in some of his posts. So until the recent Unity 5.2 release we didn't have access to a flexible or affordable game play analytics engine.
So we wrote our own. Facts Beach.
Facts Beach is a game play analytics webapp. It's meant to be simple to use, but powerful enough to give us a great understanding of how our players are interacting with Hevn's open-world and the challenges they'll face.
It uses a REST-like API, allowing the game to post developer-defined realtime events, which are stored in a PostgeSQL database. We have some pre-defined reports, but can also create custom reports, to graphically display how players move through a game, what actions are taken (or not) and how difficult or easy it might be to complete different tasks and puzzles.
I used jqplot to display charts, and materializecss for layout and styling, which made it very easy!
There are a lot of features in Unity's analytics, many we don't need for Hevn yet. Facts Beach helps us drill into exactly what we are looking for, without all the bells and whistles, while still being game engine agnostic.
The screenshots below display performance and attribute data as we test launching Hevn over and over again.
We decided to open-source the code, for any other indie developers out there who might want to use it. You can find the source at GitHub We'll be maintaining it and expanding its features as Hevn continues through play-testing!
Thanks!
Mat
