lvlboost: the blog

Before Playtomic closed we had an initiative to open source parts of the backend as a set of tools for game developers to use but the resources weren't there to finish the project.

Now it's ready.  Fully open sourced leaderboards, user levels, gamevars and geoip that you may or may not know from the old days, as a self-hosted and MIT-licensed package with (current) compatibility for AS3, Unity3d and HTML5 games.

In the old days we pioneered level metrics that allowed an army of developers to spot problems with keeping players interested, with difficulty balancing, achievements and performance.  We did that via three different types of level metrics for counting, tracking values, and tracking averages.

Now we're doing something much more exciting.  The first thing we did was consolidate those three types of metrics into a single, less confusing to use metric:

lvlboost.levelMetric(name, level, optional value, optional x, optional y, optional z);

This more versatile model allows us to do a whole bunch of cool stuff in the reports including:

counting the total occurrences, the first time for each player, and the first time for each session.

average and median values being sent, like score or time or deaths or kills

the distribution of those values

mapping everything to coordinates

The end result is pretty amazing and we're just getting started.

We've got support for your game's analytics data to be shared in two ways now - with teams and with collaborators.

Collaborators

Collaborators are people you worked with on whatever game, maybe they're your sponsor if you're coming from FGL or your artist or level designer or audio guy.  Very normal in the indie game dev scene where you have a few different people you might work with on each title.

There's no limit to how many collaborators you can add, and all you have to do is pop their email address in on your game's settings page and we'll either add it to their existing account or create an account for them and send them an email.

Teams

For the companies out there we've added teams.  Teams let you easily give and remove access to entire groups of people at once instead of doing it one by one.  There's no limit to how many teams you can have or be in, or how many people can be in each team and like with collaborators all you have to do is put in an email address and we'll take care of setting up an account for them etc if we need to.

Teams get their own special page for creating and managing them.  Only the game owner can assign a game to a team, and games can be assigned to any number of teams as well.

The end result

It's just over a week since we started our beta now and we've got some users and some games and lots of progress although mostly in backend stuff.  Two super exciting milestones are the new reports that just went live for launcher and endless runner games.

If you're not familiar with launcher games there's loads of great examples like our friends' games Berzerk Ball and Burrito Bison.  These games have a really clearly defined mechanism - you're shooting or hitting or throwing or tossing or somehow launching something as far as you can with a bunch of things that help you go further and sometimes upgrades you can buy between turns.

In lvlboost we've got an special implementation for games like this:

This lets us do a few really neat things like give you an overview report customized for this kind of game that gives immediately useful data like how many turns per session and player your game's getting over time, along with the average and median distance and scores for each turn and what upgrades people are buying between turns if that suits your game.

Best of all this is going to allow us to profile launcher games as a genre itself which is going to help you make better decisions when you're comparing your performance to similar games.

Here's how the overview looks for launcher games.  We've got a bunch more of these to do for other popular types of games which we'll roll out as they're completed.

Welcome to a new generation of game analytics.  We've approached lvlboost with years of experience and insight that nobody can rival and we've made something pretty special that is going to help everyone, from the kids making games after school all the way up to the next Zynga get new and deep value from their analytics.

We're open for testing!   There's a lot of little things left to do like account management, sharing stats, editing game details etc but for now we have enough for some developers to get started using lvlboost and enjoying the awesome innovations we're bringing to the table.

Some general notes in no particular order:

there are still some reports and benchmarks left to integrate with the reports which doesn't matter so much until we have a lot more users but will be super exciting when we do and ready in the coming days and weeks

we haven't published our iOS api yet, Javier is going to do an official objective c one and for now that will probably be all the 'officially supported' apis that we offer

your data is collected and stored in a non-aggregated format which means if you spot a bug in our reports we can fix it and regenerate the reports

we're using Google Groups for support, feel free to talk to us and offer your feedback and suggestions and whatever

if you're using an unsupported language, and there are many, we have an specification you can use to build your own library and we'd love to see you sharing that with others.

we do plan on making your data available in raw formats