Nov 2021 - Cooking In The Kitchen - Pollfish, Adstronomic, GameAnalytics, etc...

adent42

It's been a while since our last "Cooking In The Kitchen", so I though I'd share what we're working on (or looking to work on).

Now that AAB app bundles are done and we've upgraded our build system to use CocoaPods, hopefully new third-party features will come faster!

What's on our (short term) roadmap?

1) Pollfish - Pollfish (https://www.pollfish.com/) is a rewarded survey system. It will allow you to ask users to complete surveys for rewards (and rewards you $0.30 per completed survey or more). Usually the reward for surveys is in-game currency. I'm still working through the details but I think you can set the "exchange rate" on their dashboard from survey payout to in-game currency. In the game you can show either an "offerwall" or a single "rewarded survey". We'll support both modes and we'll also add a Tweet Sheet hack to let you open Pollfish separately if you want to keep your existing full screen ads.

2) Adstronomic (on hold) - I was hoping to get Adstronomic in at the same time, but that's on hold until we get some updated SDK docs. I think we'll be able to resume work pretty quickly, but if you were waiting on this one, the wait might be a bit longer.

3) Game Analytics (https://gameanalytics.com/) I'm about to start work on Game Analytics support. It will combine inherit reporting (on scene changes, loading, ad shown, etc) as well as custom event reporting via the "Tweet Sheet" behavior.

Since it's faster for me to develop on Android (mostly thanks to the new build system), these features will come out as part of RCs first, then we'll move on to iOS.

Relatively near future:

• Find a way let reward and poll ads notify the game that there is an ad ready. That way your buttons for rewarded ads or polls can be reactive and only show up when there is content available.
• Create a v2 Send Table and Get Table format that uses JSON arrays instead of pipe delimited data, just to make parsing easier.

Further Future (not in priority order):

• Update viewer app (modernized UI, the ability to directly load games from the web creator without publishing, the ability to pull games from your portfolio, dialogs to test game response for different IAP, Achievement, and Leaderboard scenarios).
• Updated Publishing web interfaces integrated into Creator 2
• Load images from URL

• For backwards compatibility it would work via a hacked TweetSheet behavior.
• For referential consistency, it would replace existing image in the game. This would allow your game to keep running with an initial "placeholder" image that gets replaced when the online image is loaded.

• Text Entry system (though depending on the work involved, it might be Creator 2.0 only).
• Something, something, NFTs?

solnika

Great @adent42 looking foreword to all ,

I'm cheering for native keyboard ! Load images from url sound very useful as well...

How about letting the user upload images from camera roll, possible? even a solution that combine text entry and image upload that will go direct to a server and then we can send it back to the game with send table and image from url, that will be awesome!

pinkio75

Great GameAnalytics, and Pollfish sound good; everything can help us to monetize our free apps is welcome!

Nothing news about .EXE builds from publishing portal? and about console export like nintendo switch?

Anyway thank you @adent42

Armelline

All sounds great!

We have a lot of stuff depending on the current SEND/GET system though to hopefully that change will have plenty of notice if it won't be backwards compatible :D

adent42

@Armelline I'm thinking of making the switch a game flag. i.e. if you add a game attribute with a particular name and value, the engine will switch to the new system. Otherwise it will keep the old system. The new one will also likely self-label with either a new value in the JSON body or in the request headers.

Armelline

Sounds good to me!

uptimistik

Any way we'll be able to send and receive bits of data (cells, rows or columns) instead of the entire table each time? @adent42

solnika

@adent42 , also any chance for android IAP subscription?

uptimistik

https://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/comment/617365#Comment_617365

That's already available

Armelline

https://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/comment/617364#Comment_617364

Yes this would be lovely!

solnika

https://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/comment/617366#Comment_617366

For android?

I know its available for ios, I didn't know we have that option for android as well.

adent42

If forget when I put it in there, but I'm pretty sure it's in @solnika. It's just not something you can call out in the IAP table. We just ask you to indicate during publishing if you have subscriptions (the "Subscriptions Present" checkbox) so we can get the subscription IAP info from google play.

adent42

@Armelline I need to take some time to look into it, but the current suggestion for that is to create a separate table just for requests and copy the subset of data you need into it (or back out).

solnika

https://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/comment/617369#Comment_617369

That's great @adent42 , I was waiting for android iap Subscriptions so I could offer a game based Subscription, as I don't wont to offer it only for one os.

I wasn't aware it was in, any guide how to use it?

Thanks

Hypnorabbit

Yep a simple get/send table function for people with no coding experience would be helpful. Otherwise it’s a pretty redundant service to tack on to a no-code platform like GS (for people like me anyway).

Not sure we need more ad providers at this point - it’s more about the functionality of the service than milking users for more than they’re worth. Besides AAB, that’s what we seem to have been doing all year.

Analytics is great but I’d like a simple get/send table ability that I can understand. Having data flow in and out of an app should be a basic service in 2021.

nir3112

https://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/comment/617372#Comment_617372

You are so right! you just took the words out of my mouth..

Braydon_SFX

Love this!

adent42

Update / FYI

In our testing environment we've got Pollfish integration pulling up surveys and we finally have events sent from an app to GameAnalytics!

Sorry this took so long (and will take a bit longer). A lot of our end-of-year housekeeping combined with some code-rot that needed to be refactored got in the way. Some info on how things will work:

--

GameAnalytics

We have a lot to write / rewrite / test since there's so much that's possible with GameAnalytics. Game Analytics doesn't have "generic" event labels but has functions for specific event types.

Here are the basics (don't worry, we'll repeat this when we release this to RC)

• Progression Event: Track game progression (Start, Complete, Fail). Tracking things like how many people finish a level or a gameplay session. You can either track it automagically via Scene Changes or turn that off in publishing and manually track. This is all dependent on your game. Obviously you can't track "Fail" if you use Scene Change tracking. For manual tracking see Triggered via Tweet
• Business Events: GA has IAP tracking events, we'll handle that automagically.
• Resource Events: GA has special events for tracking the creation and consumption of in-game currencies / items (i.e. resources). This lets you track the "economy" of your game in aggregate. Consumable purchases will automatically report a "creation" (or as we call it "Mint") event. Minting of "free" items or consumption of items will need to be tracked manually. Triggered via Tweet
• Design Events: These are "custom" events for anything not matching the above. Triggered via Tweet

What does Triggered via Tweet mean?

Eventually there will be an "Track Analytics Event" behavior, but for now we're gonna overload the Tweet Sheet behavior to allow for this. Basically you'll "Tweet" things. The "message" will indicate the special action you want to take and the "image" will be the data. For instance to track star unlocks on a game with that feature you could send the following "Tweet":

Message: "gs:trackEvent" Image: "Level1:UnlockStars:|:1"

We will intercept matching messages and do the requested action rather than triggering the Social Sharing behavior.

--

Pollfish

For Pollfish, we realized we needed to adjust our system to allow for multiple ad providers. So if Pollfish is your only "ad" provider, you can just use it like you would normally use a Rewarded Ad. But if you want to use Pollfish with another provider, you can trigger the ad display with a Tweet Sheet behavior:

Message: "gs:showInterstitialAd" or "gs:showRewardedAd" and Image: "pollfish"

This has an interesting side benefit: allowing you to trigger interstitial and rewarded ads without changing scene (the default behavior will pause the scene until you exit the ad). In the case of pollfish, since everything is rewarded, "gs:showInterstitialAd" will show the Pollfish available poll list and "gs:showRewardedAd" will go straight into the currently cached poll.

--

As you can imagine, these changes will require quite a bit of testing. But we've finished a "first-pass" of the coding with all of the things appearing to work correctly. So look forward to an RC sometime in the next couple of weeks!

Depending on testing we may release it all or we may release just Pollfish alone or maybe with GameAnalytics without IAP tracking.

Anyway, I though I'd just update the community on where we are at!

adriangomez

I am very excited about Pollfish and Gameanalytics.