![]() ![]() In the open test data, team A demonstrated a higher win rate than team B (55% to 45%).Ĥ. Players from both teams were more inclined to stay in their own half of the map than to venture into enemy territory.ĥ. The most effective weapons for this map were assault rifles, machine guns, and sniper rifles.The house on team B's side was slightly larger and it had a bottleneck (between the house and the fence) where most of the kills and movement occurred.Player activity could be redirected to underused routes by adjusting spawn points closer to these routes.ģ. The left half of the map (team B's zone) saw more activity, providing an advantage to team A.These less-traveled routes weren't ideal for placing ammo and/or medkits.This led to some routes being underused, and a diagonal activity concentration from the respawn points.Players gravitated towards routes nearest their spawn points. Players utilised all possible routes across the map.Ģ. Our key takeaways after this initial analysis were:ġ. Moreover, the initial implementation took just a few days, and subsequent analyses using heatmaps could be performed within hours. It confirmed the level designers' initial assumption that the houses on this map are the best spots for snipers.Īs a result, we discovered that heatmaps are a potent visual tool worth employing in future. So, our initial use of heatmaps was an experiment to see if this tool could highlight something that we or the game and level designers may have overlooked.įor instance, here's a narrow spot where players frequently died.Īnd this heatmap marks all the kills made with sniper rifles. This requires product knowledge, creativity, and independent thinking. An analyst's role is not just about gathering these stats but also finding solutions and sometimes even identifying the problem itself, which might not be obvious to everyone else. The thing is, not all issues are readily apparent from raw numbers. We were also eager to visually grasp player movement, the locations of most kills, the sites of frequent close combat, sniper positions, etc. This prompted us to verify our findings using heatmaps. We initially conducted testing on a small group of players and detected a significant win rate advantage for one side. ![]() When a new map was introduced in the game, we along with our level designers wondered about its actual balance. Our maiden venture into heatmap usage happened about 2.5 years ago with our mid-core online PvP shooter, World War Heroes. The most popular spots where players use a winch in an off-road simulator game This information can be overlaid onto a level map - usually taken as a standard screenshot in Unity or Unreal Engine - and allows for an examination of user movements and but also the frequency of different events at various points on the map. So how does it work? We receive analytical events from the game, including the player's coordinates at specific points in time and what the player is doing at those moments. Heatmaps can assist in enhancing metrics, visualizing weak points, and saving developers both time and substantial testing expenses. This ensures that a game's progress isn't unexpectedly hampered by some non-obvious elements (like dead ends). ![]() The main utility of this tool is to identify potential improvements in level design. We occasionally use them in hyper-casual games, but we're more focused on UI/UX analysis. Heatmaps truly shine in mid-core projects. ![]() When I say heatmaps, I'm referring to a visual representation of player actions and coordinates: pathways navigated across a map, points of user interaction, sniper positions in shooter games, challenging trajectories in various locations, and so forth. In the context of mobile games, their usage is even scarcer. Heatmaps are an intriguing and useful analytical tool, yet they're strangely underutilised, even by leading PC and console game developers. Problem areas are magically exposed and can be corrected and simple quality-of-life improvements can create the best experience possible. In this guest post, Azur Games lead analyst Alexey Platonov explains how heatmaps are underused in games development but should be used more often as a tool to gain a visual representation of player engagement. If players are having a hard time finding the fun in your game, then they're likely to look elsewhere. Understanding your audience is crucial to a games success and knowing how that audience engages with your game can be incredibly important to retaining and satisfying players. ![]()
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