I love pointless stats. They make me happy. Well kinda. I think they are pretty damn interesting, and as mentioned earlier, I have been collecting stats from every finished game of SpaceOreMiner. Though the sample set is still pretty small, I think it’s quite cool.
I use a call to a PHP script to log end of game stats ( score, ore(s) collected, time game played ) and insert this into a mysql database. The stat screen pulls this data and uses it to display the various messages on the the screen. The four graphs are dynamically generated graphs php scripts, not actually an image ( feel free to right click on them and check! ). Each graph also pulls the data down from the stats database, which it then displays in a really sweet format 🙂
You might notice the bit of javascript on the page that updates the Total <whatever> Ore mined graph, if you right click on the graph itself, you will see I am actually passing it a parameter. This parameter tells the graph which ore I am intrested in, and only pulls that info out of the database.
Sample graphs, for those to lazy to click on the stats screen 🙂
The total amount of copper mined in game. The sweet thing about dynamically generating this graph is that it is updated in real time. Go on, play a couple of games, collect lots of copper ore, reach the game over screen and come back here if you don’t believe me 🙂 ( a poor poor attempt at psychological manipulation heh ).
A slightly more interesting one, is the total numbers of games played :
This shows, obviously, the number games of played a day. Still very small numbers 🙂 The biggest short coming of this is that if a player leaves the game without reach the game over screen, I loose the stats. This is a bit of a shame, but I don’t mind … I can always improve stat tracking as I develop the game further.
I’m tracking amount of ore mined, and amount of money made, anyone got any ideas where I am going with this? hehe
If anyone wants a tutorial on how to write their own stats gathering system with php and a database, feel free to comment, more than happy to spread the knowledge 🙂
As for my unity development, it has stalled completely 🙁 Upgrading to version 3 wasn’t my best move. Unable to import my project at all to with, it bugs out with the following error when I try and load my main scene :
Assertion failed!
Program: C:\Program Files\Unity\Editor\Unity.exe
File : ..\..\Core\Common\src\IceAdjacencies.cpp
Lime : 785
Expression : !”Adjacencies: found non-manifold mesh!”
If anyone has come across this error, please get in contact! I’ve submitted a bug report, and posted on the support forums, but had no response yet, I guess they are kinda overwhelmed with everything at the moment. If I can’t get it fixed in the next couple of days, I’ll downgrade to 2.6 and continue the work with that. So keen to get back to it 🙂
Well thats all for now folks 🙂
lamentconfig
I’ve been considering lately what would be the best way to collect game stats, I would very much like to know how you approached yours. I’ve also been wondering about what Apple allows since they don’t allow third parties to collect data- does that forbid using Google Analytics, for instance. Are they saying we all have to roll our own?
Love how the game’s coming, btw. I really should post my game progress as well.
Cheers
I will totally post a tutorial on how to do it next week 🙂 The basic hook is a WWW call on the game over screen, it sends the score, and collected ore to a php script. This php script checks the data, then saves it to a mysql database. The graphs simply pull the data from this database and display it a pretty fashion 🙂
No idea about Apple’s thoughts on what they would allow or not – Google Analystics is pretty much a standard, so seems weird that would complain about that. And thanks for the feedback on how the games coming along 🙂 I’m slowly getting to where I want to be with it. And feel free to post your progress whereever and point me in the general direction, love to read about other peoples games 🙂