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Zombie Minesweeper case study

Case study - Zombie Minesweeper for iOS

Frogtoss Games is an independent game studio based in Vancouver, Canada. They released Zombie Minesweeper on the App Store in August 2011. A week later, they received rave reviews from iFanzine, GameZebo and TouchArcade. The development team chose Playtomic's analytics to gain better insights into their users.

Here's what Graham Jans, their lead developer had to say:

Graham Jans
"Thanks to Playtomic, we noticed was that no one was completing one of the powerup tutorials. I went back to try the tutorial for myself, and realized that I had introduced a crash bug on that powerup."
"We used metrics to confirm our design decisions: We loved the rabbits, with their crazy bouncing and scary noises, and wanted to add lots of them but were worried that they were too difficult. The metrics showed us they actually killed players very little, giving us the confidence to add more into the game and make it more exciting!"
Zombie Minesweeper on the iOS is built with Unity and uses Playtomic's Unity APIs. Sign up with Playtomic now, and try all our APIs for free!
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Level Metrics

By tracking level begins, endings, replays and quit events in Zombie Minesweeper, the developers identified the reasons why users were getting stuck. This helped answer the following questions about their users:

  • Were they retrying levels multiple times?
  • Where they quitting the app?
  • Were they going back to the main menu?
  • How many tries did it take to complete a level on average?

This information helped them smooth out the difficulty curve. It also led the team to alter the death-respawn loop from the earlier prototypes, by analyzing these metrics from a closed beta.

Custom Metrics

Custom metrics in Zombie Minesweer

Playtomic offers a great deal of freedom to the developer. Add any tag to any event, and we'll track it. In Zombie Minesweeper, the developers study player interactions with in-game menu items, looking for new features that could be implemented.

What we can do

Playtomic gives you detailed information on what is happening in your game and unparalleled access to detailed gameplay information.

We offer iOS game developers analytics and game development tools that are specifically designed with casual gaming in mind..

Because Playtomic is designed specifically for games we cover a variety of platforms so you can track detailed information as a cross-platform publisher and see how your game performs on iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, the internet, downloadable and more.

You can easily use the same tools across all your game development tools, share leaderboards and user generated content and more across other platforms your game is on. Our HTML5, Unity3d and Objective C APIs are zero friction

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Playtomic is free to use and only takes a few minutes to set up in your game.

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These awesome features are waiting for you:

  • GameVars that let you store configuration or anything else in our database and load it in to your game at runtime, allowing you to make updates without resubmitting a new version
  • Custom metrics that let you track any data you want
  • Level metrics that give you deep insight into how users are actually performing in your game's levels or areas.
  • Engagement metrics that help you monitor the overall user satisfaction and retention
  • Public reports you can share with your friends, advertisers or relevant parties
  • Heatmaps that can pinpoint areas of interest in your levels, screens, mas etc
  • Very flexible leaderboards that can be dynamically created in-game, include custom data in scores, and filter by custom data - automatically have a leaderboard for every vehicle in your racing game
  • Level sharing for player-created levels or other user generated content