3. @dancparkes
Coming up
● About me
● About Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade
● Let’s talk Time
● Good telemetry design
● How to manage (low) data resource
● Sharing data with your team
4. @dancparkes
About Me
● Joined Pixel Toys in 2014
● Worked on 3 shipped titles:
○ Gunfinger
○ Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade
○ Drop Dead
● Dan of all trades
○ Telemetry design & implementation
○ Automated ETL for dashboarding
○ Audio & design responsibilities
5. @dancparkes
Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade
● 10m+ downloads across 4 platforms
● 170+ missions, multiplayer and events
● 3m+ downloads in week one
● App Store Editor’s Choice Rating 4.7/5
● Awards:
○ Apple –Best iPhone Game 2015
○ TIGA –Best Game by Small Studio 2016
○ Google Play –Most Beautiful Game 2016
● 1 in 5 watch adverts (and they watch 5 a day)
7. @dancparkes
Quick implementation
● 4 weeks before soft launch
● deltaDNA for analytics
○ ...and live-ops later on
● Less time upfront becomes
a lot more time later
9. @dancparkes
Good Telemetry Design
● From source to schema - understand it all!
○ What data are you capturing?
○ How are you capturing it?
○ Where are you putting it?
● Use a master spreadsheet
○ Tedious but worth it
○ The data bible for your team
● Plan before you implement
10. @dancparkes
Good Telemetry Design
● Strict formatting standards!
○ No spaces!
● Split into categories:
○ Heartbeat
○ Economy
○ Feature
○ Performance - Livetune
● Only capture data you need
11. @dancparkes
Do I need this data?
● What are the questions you want answers to?
● What data do you need to answer these?
● DON’T TRACK DATA JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN
○ Historic data loses relevance
● GDPR: Do you need personal information?
13. @dancparkes
Enrichment: now or later?
● Example: player virtual currency
balance
a. Changes infrequently
b. Lots of events sent in between the
changes
● Options:
a. Send events when state changes and
enrich later
b. Send the current state with each event
15. @dancparkes
WARNING: Data Resource Low
How do you prioritise your data resource?
● FTUE / progression funnels
○ Once happy, stop tracking
● KPIs throughout - try to automate this
● Releasing a feature? Feature focused analytics
○ Strip out telemetry for old features
Where possible, get product managers, designers and other disciplines
involved. You should be doing the heavy lifting wherever is necessary
17. @dancparkes
Retroactive vs Proactive
The dream: Proactive data design using modelling to predict the future
The reality: Focus drawn to understanding what’s happening now!
The lesson: Prediction models require time and attention, i.e. dedicated data
resource
The challenge: Communicating this to producers, product owners, etc.
19. @dancparkes
Sharing data with your team
● Must be easy to find & read
○ This is down to personal preference as well!
● Find the right metrics
● KPIs: $ over £!
● Spreadsheets are ubiquitous
○ ...but prone to error
● Automate
○ ...but consider flexibility to add more
Gunfinger - level designer and first taste of analytics with Flurry and MySQL
Drop Dead - October 2016 on Gear VR and is now available on the Rift and the newly launched Oculus GO. Drop Dead is 1 of 3 included in the essentials pack!
Advert metrics inspired by previous GIAF focus
Due to invitation to debut with the iPhone 6S
We should have had 2 to 3 times as long to design and implement data
QA your data
What is your pipeline capable of? What limitations are there?
“Master” means the one stop shop.
Formatting: camelCase vs dashes vs dots (prefered styling in R) vs underline
More on capturing data shortly
Categories in that order of priority - performance can be handled using Unity’s upcoming Livetune
It’s easy to use the “I’m sure we’ll use it” excuse. Think about your resource. Think about the purpose. Does it warrant the cost?
UI interaction - we turned it off!
GDPR: Common use of personal info is for cohorting. Do you need it? If so, ensure you’re compliant
Example:
When culling events, we stopped sending UI interaction events. FOR: It’s data we’re not using! CON: We might want to do a UI heatmap!
Resource dependent. Freeblade - resource was low so we sent a lot of data with some events
Entire wargear setup with mission data
Pick one or the other. Often, it’ll be resource related
Funnels not as important once game has been out for a while but, if you change them, you want to track the change
Personal preference: the inspiration for building our own dashboards was because the deltaDNA dashboards proved hard to read
Not everyone speaks data
What are the right metrics to show health of your game? Some can be misleading: e.g. crashes per day vs crashes per user vs % of users who’re crashing
R projects stored in local git repo
Docked elasticsearch instances for each project we work on
Grafana on top - for health monitoring and dashboards in future