[monoRAIL]

monoRAIL

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Go Beryllium was my first game to use an online scoreboard, and it's been very informative discovering how people play the game.

It uploads a high score entry for everyone who plays the game, if they're connected to the internet. Although the scoreboard only shows the top 20 (http://cokane.com/games/beryllium/highscores.php) I keep all submitted scores in the database.

Here's some interesting figures...

Since the game was publicly released about 2 weeks ago it has been played by 450 people. (2,000 viewed the trailer on YouTube).

17 people lasted less than 30 seconds and then gave up.
The lowest score so far is 5 seconds.

30 people have completed the game on easy mode. (13% of players)
2 people have completed the game on hard mode. (less than 1%)

90 people played with inertia turned off. (20%)
12 people in the top 20 played with inertia off. This suggests that either good players prefer inertia off, or turning inertia off makes you score higher - however the top score score is set by an inertia on player, so it's not exactly conclusive.

Most of the inertia off scores were submitted immediately after I posted the game on the shmups.com forum 

So in conclusion - I highly recommend recording stats for your game with an online scoreboard, you'll learn a lot about how people are playing your games. The source code for Go Beryllium (including the php script for the online scoreboard) is available here.
Here is the tutorial which I used to learn how to do online scores.

[motorherp]

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Awesome post, it's interesting to see these breakdowns.  Quite revealing is just how few bother to play the game after watching the video even though it's free, that's a little dissapointing.  Just goes to show why games companies place so much focus on graphics and presentation, first impressions are important.  Also does the score board only show one entry per player?  It would interesting to know the breakdown of how many times people played the game.  I'd like to know how many people return to it and play it again compared to how many have a few goes then forget about it.

[Sar]

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Quite revealing is just how few bother to play the game after watching the video even though it's free, that's a little dissapointing.

One wonders how many of those people saw the video and were convinced that they'd never last more than five seconds, and didn't bother trying... a lot of modern gamers seem to be rather put off by shooters.

I remember once showing someone a video of a Touhou game and getting the question "...but that video's been sped up to, like, four times normal speed, right?"; I kind of wonder if first impressions of this kind of game can ever be much better without sacrificing the kind of gameplay that shooter fans enjoy.

[the2bears]

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Very interesting observations

Bill

[monoRAIL]

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Motorherp - when a player submits a new score, their lower entry is deleted, so I don't keep track of every submission, just every player. However I do record the date stamps so I can see that most players only play the game for 1 day. Only the people who have managed to complete the easy mode have come back and played it on a later date. The low number of downloads is pretty disappointing alright, but then I haven't really done much to promote the game - it's only been on a few indie game blogs.

For comparison, Harpooned, which showed up on some major news sites and was on TV has had 16,650 downloads and 56,450 YouTube views. So 30% of those who watched the trailer decided to download the game. Only 20% of Go Beryllium trailer views translated into game plays, probably as Sar suggested because it just looks hard.

If Go Beryllium had been shareware for $5, and my conversion rate for purchases was 1% (which is a high estimate!) I'd have made $22.50 by now! w00t!

[hima]

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Wow, this is really interesting. Thanks for sharing! But you collect stat from only those who submit the score, right? So there might be more players out there who doesn't submit their score, no?

[monoRAIL]

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If someone enters their name as 'noname' then the game doesn't upload a high score, or if they're not connected to the internet when they're playing then it also won't upload. But other than that, every time you play the game it checks to see if you've beaten your record, and if you have it uploads the score either when you check the leaderboards or when you quit.

[monoRAIL]

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Up to 500 players now.
Here's what the raw data looks like in the database...



My webhost has a phpMyAdmin interface to the mysql database. It's all visual with buttons and menus so you don't even have to know any sql commands to browse the data and sort it in interesting ways. You can see from that page that 20 new players submitted scores yesterday (yellow) and 2 people played hard mode (the red scores over 400).

[why does the forum shrink images???]