New Features – Analytics, Hooks and More Usability

Here at SOOMLA, we are big believers in continuously deploying features and fixes. Co-founder Gur can give you a whole lecture about why continuous deployment is the way to go for web applications and SAAS products but that’s probably a different post. The downside of this method is that a lot of really good stuff we release go unnoticed. Here are some of the things we released in the last few weeks.

New Features And Fixes Added to SOOMLA

We added a new Analytics tab. We are planning to put nice charts in there but as a first step the focus is on the ability to drill down and inspect specific users. Here are some of the things you can do:

• Browse your users and filter them by different purchase types
• Inspect each user’s balances and events.
• Flag users suspected for fraud as ignored.  The dashboard won’t include them when showing analytics.

Another area we started focusing on is 3rd party integrations. We call these hooks and the idea is that you can manage them through the dashboard by checking check boxes rather than integrating and removing SDKs. The first one we launched is for an offer wall provided by SponsorPay. This hook allows you to easily receive a new revenue stream from advertising without adding any unwanted ads to your development. To those of you who are not familiar with the concept, it’s a 3 way transaction in which:

• The user clicks a button called “Earn Coins” and can choose to watch videos or take similar actions in return for ingame coins
• The companies who made these videos are called advertisers and are paying every time the video is watched or a desired action is taken
• You, the game publisher, receive revenue from the advertisers (through SponsorPay) and SOOMLA will reward the user with the coins for you.

Another area we invested in is platform support. We already announced the new and improved Cocos2d-x JavaScript plugin in a separate post and we also now support Unity 4.3 for Android.

On the Store Dashboard, we also rolled out a few cool updates to make it as easy and intuitive as possible. Here are the main improvements:

• Categories can be re-ordered
• You can now clone a Store Front

Finally, we added the ability to start users off with initial balances for goods and coins. If you want your players to engage with the economy you built (yes, you do) you can play around with the initial amounts to test the optimal starting point.