2. About Us
Richard Wifall
– Chief Technology Officer
– Previously CTO at EA Sports
– Twitter: @iNikkor
Chris Staymates
– Software Engineer
– Previously Software Architect for Madden NFL Football
– Twitter: @cstays
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3. About Row Sham Bow
Startup game development studio
Games as a service
Game analytics as a service
21 employees
Games:
– Letter by Letter (iOS, Android)
– Knights of the Rose (Facebook)
– Woodland Heroes (Facebook)
2011 Social Game of the Year on Gamasutra
Twitter: @rowshambowgames
4. Splunk at Row Sham Bow
Data is critical to our
business
Operational telemetry
Bug finding
User behavior
telemetry
More…
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5. Challenge: Launching Letter by Letter
It’s difficult to predict adoption of a new product
Does real world user behavior match user behavior of testers?
Letter by Letter was launching with a large burst marketing campaign
Needed visibility into operational errors + fast root cause analysis
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6. Proactive Capacity Planning
Used Splunk to monitor user behavior and server
load
Used initial data from Splunk to project when we
would reach capacity on our webservers
Increased number of servers during launch based
on projected load
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7. Finding Client Bugs
Assert handler sends telemetry to Splunk
– Includes stack trace
Out of range error when a tile is dropped
Off by one error
– if(localPoint.x >= 0 && localPoint.x <= (mTileSize.x * mWidth))
Only occurred on certain screen resolutions
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8. Funnel Analysis: Tutorials
Modern games have tutorials:
– What the game is about and how to play it
Funnel Analysis
– How many people started tutorial and how many made it through each step
In Woodland Heroes saw big drop off after the first battle
Lessons learned from Woodland Heroes helped Letter by Letter
Solution: Splunk helped us see where
users were dropping off
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9. Our Data Platform
In order to run a games business you need operational data, player
behavior data, the ability to run A/B tests, and more
We are building an analytics data solution for our own use and for other
companies
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10. An Example: A/B Testing
We need more than just seeing what players are doing
We need to see what features are the most likely to be most successful
– Try a new feature with a small portion of the audience, and compare against a
control group
Example:
– Changing text in a notification to see what words cause a user to be more likely
to click
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11. How Does this Integrate with Splunk?
Splunk is great at collecting and searching data
With Splunk’s REST API we can pull Splunk searches into our tool
This allows us to show data from Splunk alongside data from A/B tests
and other sources for us and our clients
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12. Summary
Splunk allows us to easily monitor games, take action on what we see
and see the results.
Splunk makes it easy for us to integrate it with the rest of our data
platform.
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13. Let’s Talk
We’re hiring
– Dev Ops, Systems Administration
– Software Engineer, Analytics Platform
– Software Engineer, Mobile Games
– jobs@rowshambow.com
– http://rsbgames.co/jobs
Data platform questions
– chris@rowshambow.com
Play Letter by Letter
– http://rsbgames.co/lxl
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