I completed the analytics work this week. It wasn’t in the demo scope but it has been incredibly valuable in balancing.
- New analytics. In addition to items and item locations, combinations of items and item locations are tracked. This is useful for understanding where players are obtaining items – are the items carried by an enemy, contained in a pile of debris, in a bookcase, etc.?
- Balancing adjustments. After reviewing the enemy and item stats from 200 level 1 map samples, I made a number of adjustments: prevent starter equipment from dropping; increase frequency of bats, bones with items, and equipment drops; decrease frequency of animated bones and skeleton archers.
- Unity Analytics. I enabled Unity Analytics to collect events from other players. Out-of-the-box, Unity Analytics provides metrics including new and active users, session length, and sessions per daily active user with various filters such as country and platform. I added custom events for when the player chooses a class, wins, or dies.
- Multi-session error file. The debug logger currently has the ability to log to the Unity console, a log file, and a CSV file. A new file is created each session. Errors across multiple sessions can now be logged to a single file. This makes it easier to determine the most common errors and investigate errors from previous sessions.
- Software updates. Upgraded Unity (first time in two years), plugins, and Rider. Surprisingly, no code changes were required.
The remaining tasks for the demo are:
- Major bugs fixed: 92%->85%. I set this back to 85% because I’m finding more bugs as I playtest more.
- Balancing: 65%->75%
Next week, I’m focusing on bug fixing and obtaining analytics on demo levels 2 and 3 to finish balancing those levels.