Analytics!

Once again push notifications have become a pain.

We did learn that Flash can natively push notifications, no external libraries needed. Which is nice, however it is dependent on the traditional Flash Stage, which we do not use in Starling.

So for the moment, we are going to move on. But we are still going to release a quick 1st week patch with the work that I have been doing.

The move to Starling 1.4.1 has optimized a few things, allowing a smoother experience for iPhone users. This update will also include the work I did today: analytics.

Utilizing a library created by Stick-Sports, Pathogen is now logging player data to Flurry. This flexible tool set allows me to track a variety of different data that we can use to help shape the game experience. How long is the median time for a level? What level are players giving up on? Which is the most difficult? What difficulty are they playing on? How many people on average play in a local game? And so many more questions we will be able to answer with the data the game returns to us.

This is the kind of stuff I love looking over. Our first game, Loc, was built with this kind of thing in and it really helped to polish the difficulty curve of the experience.

On top of the service that Flurry provides, Flox will also help to map the average play session of a user, look at retention rates, etc.

Think of these services as a heart beat monitor. By watching the data you can see the state of the game & know when/where you need to react in order to keep it healthy.

& for those of you who haven't seen this: http://vimeo.com/9985840