So, I got this working in my project yesterday, but it takes 24 hrs for the data to show up in the reports section. So today, I’m trying to make sense of it all.
I use storyboard, and turned on the option in GameAnalytics to use the storyboard features. One of the features is to automatically populate the “Area” on the analytics with the scene name.
I can see that it does this by viewing the messages being sent, (although, there is a bug in this, because the first scene doesn’t sends a blank area. Because you can’t start gameAnalytics until you’ve already entered a scene, and for some reason any message you send while in that first scene doesn’t contain the “Area”, but once you move to a new scene, all messages after that are fine.) so that’s a bug… but not my main concern.
My concern for this post, is that when I went to the reports today, I can’t seem to find anywhere at all where the AREA matters, or where I can sort on that or anything.
For example, If I’m in a scene called “3-3”, and I send a message for “puzzle:solved”, it sends the area of 3-3 with it. But on other messages I actually sent a message of “hint:gotHint:3-3” where I appended the scene myself as a sub-section. In the case where I appended the scene as a sub-section, the reports look a bit helpful, but in the ones where I relied on the AREA, it just glops all the data into one single data point, with no way to sort out anything.
Which leaves me wondering, what the heck is the AREA for, if not for what I was trying to do with it. In the documentation, it mentions using it as a LEVEL indicator, but again, since there’s no way to use it to sort or group afterwards, what good is it even for that.