The end of October swung around and with it the deadline for the student IGF. Mike, Matt and I sat down and at the on that Halloween weekend hit the ground running. We worked seven hours straight that Saturday and pulled off a build about 4 hours before the deadline. That was a crazy push, especially since we had been in the lab the night before working on our own game for school, and we went back again on Sunday to work with the rest of our team on that. After submitting, we took a well deserved break, letting Loc sit for a while. We really just needed to refocus on school work.
During that time I went up to Montreal and attended the Montreal International Game Summit (MIGS). It’s a great little conference I had been attending for the past three years and is like a micro version of GDC.
Every year I see one or two really good talks that change/affect my views on game design and last year was no exception. Caryl Shaw, a developer with ngmoko gave a great talk about game Analytics. The concept blew my mind. I had always been interested in graphs and stat tracking, but never had we talked about that it could do for Game Design. She broke down why it was important and how their built in analytics engine fed them data.
I came back and told the others we HAD to do this. Loc was a prime target to be analyzed. Matt jumped on board and together he and I led the charge on the analytics front. I had a nice beginner knowledge of MySQL after trying to rig together a database Server for Champlain College, but Matt was the true heavy hitter having years of experience creating databases. Looking through everything I created a list of all the variables we would want to catch and together we planned it out.
Using this system we got real-time feedback of how long each user took on each level, the number of restarts, how many stars they got, the average time of their play session, and so much more.
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