We’re happy to announce our partnership with GameAnalytics, a powerful tool that helps developers understand player behaviour so they can improve engagement, reduce churn and increase monetization.
The tool gives game developers a central platform that consolidates player data from various channels to help visualize their core gaming KPIs in one convenient view. It also enables team members to collaborate with reporting and benchmark their game to see how it compares with more than 12,000 similar titles.
You can set up GameAnalytics in a few minutes and it’s totally free of charge, without any caps on usage or premium subscription tiers. If you’d rather see the platform in action before making any technical changes, just sign up for free to view the demo game with pre-populated data.
GameAnalytics is trusted by more than 40,000 game developers worldwide and handles over five billion unique events every day across 2+ billion devices. The platform is widely integrated, with SDKs for every major game engine. The following guide will outline how to install the GameAnalytics SDK for GameMaker so that you can start tracking player behaviour in four steps.
1. CREATE A FREE GAMEANALYTICS ACCOUNT
To get started, sign up for a free GameAnalytics account and add your first game. When you’ve created your game, you’ll find the integration keys in the settings menu (the gear icon), under “Game information.” You’ll need to copy your Game Key and Secret Key for the following steps.
2. DOWNLOAD THE SDK FOR GAMEMAKER STUDIO
Next, download the GameAnalytics SDK for GameMaker. Once downloaded, you can begin the installation process.
3. INSTALL THE NATIVE GAMEMAKER SDK
For GameMaker Studio:
- Unzip the downloaded .zip
- Open GameMaker: Studio and right-click on the Extensions folder and click on Import extension.
- Select the .gmez file from the unzipped file
- Right-click on the newly imported extension and click on Import Resources and click on Import All in the import pop-up window
To download GameAnalytics SDK for Gamemaker Studio 2 go to the marketplace: https://marketplace.yoyogames.com/assets/5179/gameanalytics
4. INITIALIZE THE INTEGRATION
Call this method to initialize using the Game Key and Secret Key for your game:
// Initializega_initialize("[game key]", "[secret key]");
Below is a practical example of code that is called at the beginning of the game to initialize GameAnalytics:
// ... other code from your project ...
ga_setEnabledInfoLog(true);ga_setEnabledVerboseLog(true);
ga_configureBuild("0.10");
{var array = ga_array("gems", "gold");ga_configureAvailableResourceCurrencies(array);}
{var array = ga_array("boost", "lives");ga_configureAvailableResourceItemTypes(array);}
{var array = ga_array("ninja", "samurai");ga_configureAvailableCustomDimensions01(array);}
{var array = ga_array("whale", "dolphin");ga_configureAvailableCustomDimensions02(array);}
{var array = ga_array("horde", "alliance");ga_configureAvailableCustomDimensions03(array);}
ga_initialize("[game key]", "[secret key]");
5. BUILD TO YOUR GAME ENGINE
GameAnalytics has provided full documentation for each game engine and platform. You can view and download all files via their new docs page, or follow the steps below.
You can also connect to the service using their Rest API.
Viewing your game data
Once implemented, GameAnalytics provides insight into more than 50 of the top gaming KPIs, straight out of the box. Many of these metrics are viewable on a real-time dashboard to get a quick overview of the health of your game throughout the day.
The real-time dashboard gives you visual insight into your number of concurrent users, incoming events, new users, returning users, transactions, total revenue, first time revenue and error logs.
Creating custom events
You can create your own custom events with unique IDs, which allow you to track actions specific to your game experience and measure these findings within the GameAnalytics interface. Event IDs are fully customizable and should fall within one of the following event types:
Event - Description
Business - In-App Purchases supporting receipt validation on GA servers.
Resource - Managing the flow of virtual currencies – like gems or lives.
Progression - Level attempts with Start, Fail & Complete event.
Error - Submit exception stack traces or custom error messages.
Design - Submit custom event IDs. Useful for tracking metrics specifically needed for your game.
For more information about planning and implementing each of these event types to suit your game, visit the game analytics data and events page.
ABOUT THE GAMEANALYTICS DASHBOARDS
Developers using GameAnalytics can track their events in a selection of dashboards tailored specifically to games. The dashboards are powerful, yet totally flexible to suit any use case.
Overview Dashboard
With this dashboard, you will see a quick snapshot of your core game KPIs.
Acquisition Dashboard
This dashboard provides insight into your player acquisition costs and best marketing sources.
Engagement
This dashboard helps to measure how engaged your players are over time.
Monetization
This dashboard visualizes all of the monetization metrics relating to your game.
Progression
This dashboard helps you understand where players grind or drop off in your game.
Resources
This dashboard helps you balance the flow of “sink” and “gain” resources in your game economy.
You can find a more detailed overview for each dashboard on the GameAnalytics documentation portal.
