Video Game Analytics on AWS
This talk will cover how to use AWS technologies to build an analytics system for video games which can be used to analyse player behaviour in near real-time. This system enables developers to identify trends in player difficulties, ease of use, the highs and lows of player engagement and how to visualise these results in-game. This demo uses a serverless approach for data capturing, processing and serving using AWS Mobile Analytics, Apache Spark on DataBricks, Athena and Lambda technologies.
Representing data in game enables developers to see results in an environment they are already very familiar with and adjust level design to maximise engagement. Developers can use this information to track the effects of updated releases to easily identify if changes have had the intended effect. These same techniques can be applied in many scenarios including web tracking and click stream analytics.
Outline/Structure of the Demonstration
This demo will show how events are captured in the Unity game engine using AWS Mobile Analytics, how the data is processed and explored in Apache Spark, how it is stored in S3, how it can be queried using AWS Athena, how it is exposed through AWS Lambda, and finally how it is presented to users in-game in Unity.
Learning Outcome
AWS has a large amount of services available, it can be a little daunting when first figuring out what they are and how they can be used. Attendees new to AWS will learn how to fit the services together to build a full data pipeline. Experienced attendees will learn how to serve data in a serverless fashion
Target Audience
People who want to learn how AWS services can fit together to form full applications
Prerequisites for Attendees
No prior knowledge required, though familiarity with Spark and AWS would be beneficial
Links
25 May, 2017 - Speaker at Tech Wide Boulevard
https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/SSD-MeetUp/events/239032376/
in 2010, I created a video training series for 3dbuzz.com on how to create a side scrolling game for Xbox and PC
http://www.3dbuzz.com/training/view/xna-side-scroller/xna-side-scroller
I am currently working on another series for 3dbuzz.com which will teach how to create the analytics platform demo'ed in this talk from scratch. It assumes no prior knowledge of the AWS technolgies involved. This talk will not be used as an advertising platform for 3dbuzz.com
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