Integrating GameAnalytics with Roblox
GameAnalytics has developed a Roblox SDK for integrating their platform with your games. GameAnalytics is a powerful analytics tool that will help you understand player behavior, improve engagement, retain players, and increase monetization.
Developers have been talking recently about the advantages of using event-based analytics to help improve your games with a recent series of Analytics articles, starting with an Introduction to Analytics and most recently discussing how to design for engagement. With GameAnalytics supported Roblox SDK, you now have a powerful and easy way to implement analytics in your game.
Why GameAnalytics?
GameAnalytics gives you access to data that you can use to inform your development decisions. If you want to bring your game to the next level, using and understanding event-based analytics is critical. GameAnalyticsās analytical tools and platform allow you to gain insights into player behavior and how your content is performing. For example, you can find out what items sell the best in your game, where new players get confused and stop playing, what content players engage with the most, and more. You can also compare your key metrics against those of over 19,000 games (both Roblox and non-Roblox!) across the platform to understand how well your game is doing.
You can set up GameAnalytics for free in just a few short minutes. If you want to check out the platform before integrating it with your own game, thereās a nifty demo game with pre-populated data available when you sign up.
The SDK from GameAnalytics can be installed in 3 short steps.
Step 1: Create a GameAnalytics account
Sign up for a free GameAnalytics account and add your game. After youāve created your game, youāll find the integration keys in the settings menu (the gear icon) under āGame information.ā Copy your Game Key and Secret Key for the following steps.
Step 2: Install the GameAnalytics SDK for Roblox
Method 1: GitHub ZIP installation
- Download the GameAnalytics SDK for Roblox GitHub ZIP
- Unzip the ZIP file
- Inside Roblox Studio, right-click on Workspace. Click āInsert from fileā¦ā and select the unzipped .rbxmx file.
Method 2: Roblox module page installation
- On the GameAnalytics Roblox module page click on the āGetā button.
- Inside Roblox Studio, select Workspace, open the Toolbox and select My Models.
- Click on the GameAnalytics module to add it to Workspace.
Regardless of which method you use, once the module has been installed inside Roblox Studio:
- Move the GameAnalytics script (together with its children) under ServerStorage
- Move the GameAnalyticsScript script under ServerScriptService
- Move the GameAnalyticsClient script under StarterPlayer/StarerPlayerScripts
It should look something like this:
Step 3: Initialize the integration
The final step involves adding the code to activate the SDK. There are 3 phases for this step:
The configuration calls configure settings for the SDK. These settings cannot be altered after initialize has been called._
The initialize call will start the SDK and activate the first session._
- Adding events or changing dimensions
The configuration and initialization steps should be called when your game starts.
If you want to learn more about configuring and initializing the SDK, GameAnalytics has put together a Roblox SDK guide, which has a ton of details and useful code to help you get started.
Once the SDK has been configured and initialized, the final step involves adding events in your game code where some relevant action is happening.
GameAnalytics has some useful resources for learning about data and events:
Data and Events - what are events and how are they useful?
Designing Custom Events - learn how to structure your events
How to Implement Event Tracking - how to track events in your game
Viewing your game data
Once youāre all set up, youāll find insights into more than 50 of the top gaming Key Performance Indicators (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.
Cool features youāll find in GameAnalytics
At this point, Iām sure youāre itching to dive straight into GameAnalytics and start experimenting. Before you do, I want to quickly show you some of the things you can do:
Dashboards
Using the dashboards, youāll be able to get accurate insights into all of your most pressing questions. These dashboards can be customized, so you can see the metrics that matter most to you.
Real-time
You can track real-time player data and behavior with the Real-time feature. This feature is useful for tracking concurrent users and key metrics after updates or during featuring and game events to make sure everything is going smoothly.
Explore
Using the explore tool you can be as creative as you want with your player data, before customizing the graphs on your dashboards. Select metrics, apply filters, and visualize your results in unique ways that benefit you.
Segments
Here youāll be able to accurately target specific groups of players (or segments) by geography, specific player attributes, or by similar behaviors in your game.
Funnels
Funnels allow you to learn how your players are progressing through specific levels or flows in your game and where they falter. Funnel analysis is particularly useful for figuring out issues with your gameās engagement or retention.
Cohorts
Use cohorts to see metrics relating to a specific audience and track their changes over time so you can find out how well a particular campaign, promotion, or in-game update is doing.
You can find a more detailed overview for each dashboard on the GameAnalytics documentation portal.
If you have any questions or problems, feel free to post a reply below. Iāll try my best to help as much as possible.
Thanks for reading!
