Free game analytics

Engines and Middleware Programming Unity

Started by phil_t June 20, 2016 11:46 PM

2 comments, last by phil_t 7 years, 10 months ago

8,087

Author

June 20, 2016 11:46 PM

I have text parser based game, and I want to collect analytics on phrases the player enters that don't get a proper response. Mainly for beta-testing (though it would be nice to have it in production code too, but I understand the volume of data could be prohibitive)

I'm using Unity. I've checked out the analytics support included with Unity, but it's not really suited to tracking arbitrary strings (you would use up your "analysis points" very quickly).

Does anyone know of any other quick and easy solutions I could use? Worse comes to worst, I can just have the game store the data in a file on the player's computer and then have them email it to me. This only works on PC/Mac of course - ideally I'd want it to send the data to a webserver so it would work for WebGL, etc... too. And then they can just play the game, and I can see the data online somewhere.

I lease space on a webserver for hosting downloads, etc..., but I'm not very fluent in web development, so I don't feel like writing my own service that would handle these submissions.

Cascade Quest - IceFall Games - Dev blog - twitter - youtube

Servant of the Lord

33,739

June 21, 2016 03:34 AM

Worse comes to worst, I can just have the game store the data in a file on the player's computer and then have them email it to me.

Or just have your game auto-email it to you.

Here's what one GameDevver did. Another, IIRC, used Google Analytics and pretended that his smartphone app was a webpage.

phil_t

8,087

Author

June 21, 2016 07:42 AM

Thanks for the links. Yeah, I want something simple like the guy at the first link did. Really, all I need is something on the server side than can accept uploads (with some key/password/whatever to validate it's coming from my app) and store them on my server. He's got some Django code snippet there that does that I guess, but I've never even heard of Django. Or boto.

I have Open Web Analytics as a one-click install on my webhost, maybe I can get something out of that....

Cascade Quest - IceFall Games - Dev blog - twitter - youtube

phil_t

8,087

Author

June 22, 2016 04:45 PM

Turns out it was very simple (even for this non-web developer) to just cobble something together in php:

<html>
 <head>
  <title>PHP Test</title>
 </head>
 <body>
 <?php
 
 parse_str($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'], $query);
 if ($query["key"] == "MyGameName")
 {
        $thingy = $query["stuff"] . "\r\n";
file_put_contents("somefile.txt", $thingy  , FILE_APPEND);
//var_dump($query);
 }
  else
{
echo '<p>DENIED</p>';
 
}
 
 ?> 
 </body>
</html>

And now I can just make an http head request from my game and stick the needed string in the url, and have it appended to a file on my server.

Cascade Quest - IceFall Games - Dev blog - twitter - youtube

Free game analytics

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