Freeblade - A retrospective
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This document summarizes Dan Parkes' experience working as a data analyst at Pixel Toys. It discusses his work on three shipped mobile games, with a focus on Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade. It provides tips on good telemetry design, including planning data collection upfront, only capturing necessary data, and culling unused data. It also discusses challenges around limited data resources and balancing retroactive vs. proactive data analysis. The document advocates for automating dashboard and data sharing processes while maintaining flexibility.
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Freeblade - A retrospective
- 2. @dancparkes A retrospective by Dan Parkes
- 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)
- 6. @dancparkes
- 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
- 8. @dancparkes PRO TIP 1: Allocate appropriate time
- 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?
- 12. @dancparkes PRO TIP 2: Play devil’s advocate
- 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
- 14. @dancparkes PRO TIP 3: Immediacy || Efficiency
- 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
- 16. @dancparkes PRO TIP 4: Cull the dead weight
- 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.
- 18. @dancparkes PRO TIP 5: Pay to be proactive
- 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
- 22. @dancparkes A new place to work! jobs@pixeltoys.com
Editor's Notes
- 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