Taking the First Step with Analytics

Hey everyone,

This week, I worked on a less visible but important feature: adding analytics to the game. The goal is simple: to get a better, anonymous overview of how people are playing so I can make the game more fun and balanced.

While the plan is to eventually track more detailed (but always anonymous) gameplay events, I've started with a very simple, minimal approach for now. I've implemented a single event that fires only when a player starts a new game or loads a save file.

This is done with a small block of code in the launchGame function, which sends a game_launched event to Google Analytics.

This basic metric is incredibly helpful. It allows me to see the difference between someone who just visits the game's page versus someone who actually begins a play session. It’s the first step in understanding player engagement.

For now, that's it! This minimal approach lets me confirm everything is working correctly before I consider adding more detailed, privacy-respecting analytics in the future to help balance things like the tech tree or resource distribution.

Thanks for following along!