[RELEASED] OpenFire - Big data driven networking, analytics, and database

Imagine a piece of software that is able to telepathically know what your players want from your games; to know what they think is fun, to know why they are or are not buying in-app products, or clicking on ads. Imagine being able to craft the perfect app for your players. This software exists, and it is normally referred to as big data. Big data has previously only been available through ad agencies, or for multimillion dollar corporations; until now.

Introducing OpenFire:

What is OpenFire?

OpenFire is a plugin for IOS and Android Unity games that makes big data easy. Using the same backend that developers like King use as easily as drag-and-drop will feel like cheating, and the edge it will give you over other developers basically is.

OpenFire is a Firebase powered analytics engine for IOS and Android unity games. Firebase can track up to 500 distinct events with up to 50 unique user properties, and utilizes BigQuery to process your data, telling you how your players are playing your game. OpenFire is a fire-and-forget solution, requiring no maintenance and integrating easily with any pre-existing app.

BigQuery lets you see how your players are using your game like never before, and lets you know objectively how your consumers react to gameplay, updates, ad campaigns, and more. Optimizing for maximum player fun and developer profit without a big data solution is almost impossible. With OpenFire, it is incredibly easy.

OpenFire additionally configures (as well as authenticates) the Firebase database for you, giving you unfettered access to one of the most secure and fast databases on the planet. This can easily be used as a multiplayer backend, storage system, or as a way to update your games without pushing anything to the mobile stores.

In depth details

Tracking data events can not only directly inform you on how your players are consuming your product, but they can directly tell you what they do or do not like, allowing you to create a better overall gaming experience. Furthermore, with the advent of tracking data such as ad impressions and in app purchases, more data will directly translate into more profit. This isn’t just buzzword soup, as many other analytics engines may promise. OpenFire creates a development experience that returns simple to understand, simple to act upon data.

Traditionally, data gathering and analysis has been quite difficult, especially for unity. While Unity Analytics and Google Analytics can both provide some useful data, they lack the nuance that is required to get truly meaningful figures from all of the noise that they generate. By providing in-depth context to events, Firebase can give you a precise analysis on why your players behave the way they do when playing your game.

What is context? Context is the situation under which your users performed an action. With Unity Analytics, or Google Analytics, it’s easy to track users performing an action such as clicking on an ad; however, with OpenFire, you can understand the precise conditions the user performed the action under- everything from time spent playing the game, the user’s individual skill, level difficulty, the state of random objects, as well as up to five hundred fully custom contexts.

To further add contexts to event, a user may be tagged with up to 50 fully custom attributes, plus gender, age, and locale. This user attribution can, again, further segment your base; certain products might resonate better with certain genders, and you would have literally no way of knowing without proper data analysis.

Data collection with complex contexts requires no effort at all from the developer, the plugin simply existing in your project will return enormous quantities of analytical data.

The Firebase database stores content in JSON and proliferates file changes throughout the entire user base you have globally within milliseconds. It allows you to do socket-less, easy, networking.

Data examples (pretty graphs):

Some raw event data (just event invocations, no context)

Distribution of the number of times people shared the app on social media vs their win rate.

Red line; visualized X axis (because the data group has value)

Distribution of the number of ad impressions vs player level (sum, not average)

Player win rate vs how many sprinkles they have (sprinkles are an in-game currency)

Features:

  • Automatic user attribute collection upon authentication, to better segment your client base

  • Automatic event state tracking, so that when an event occurs, you know the precise context- templates come with the plugin, but context variables may be set to whatever you want.

  • Native Facebook integration for authentication + refined user attributes

  • Fully customizable authentication- authenticate your users from any API that provides unique user strings, or even authenticate your users from email + password.

  • Anonymous user analytics tracking- your users don’t have to sign in to collect data from them!

  • Exposed Firebase Database SDK; No-effort setup of one of the fastest and most reliable databases on the planet, which is both secure enough to store personal user data and fast enough to backend multiplayer shooters.

  • BigQuery processes your data for you, showing clear as day what influences your user’s behaviors.

Documentation:

**[AVAILABLE ON THE ASSET STORE NOW- HALF OFF]**

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or message me directly.

Plugin developers with questions about OpenFire / seeking to license OpenFire for integration with their plugins may contact me directly via PM, or may contact the team at
superkawaiiltd@gmail.com

Ooh, this is pretty exciting! When is it coming out?

Full database integration has been added! All data transferred is through dataContracts, and incredibly simple to use (not to mention INSANELY FAST AND SECURE. Backend for multiplayer, anyone?). A code example will be up soon.

The top slider is uploading to the remote database, and the bottom slider is downloading. All hardware is handled by google. If this were a network backend, you players would see each other updating THIS QUICKLY when playing multiplayer, and this is with 0 attempt at using any kind of smoothing. The data is updating at 60fps.

Analytics and Database documentation have been added to the OP!

It’s been submitted to the asset store, so hopefully within a week.

Code samples are coming soon, and I’m probably going to network an open source 2d platformer game and throw that sucker in webGL to demonstrate it’s multiplayer capabilities.

Working on a game to demo the database’s speed right now, that’s the cloud updating on the right!

If you want to track this project, It’s a pretty good example of the database’s capabilities!

This is somehow still under review, but until it’s released I’ll be continuing to showcase the development of a full multiplayer back-end with this!

The back-end was actually created very quickly for this project, but getting the style just right has been a pain.


OpenFire has been released!