Executive Summary

‘Euchre with Friends’ and Game Fabric v1.0 are very close to marketplace release. Gameplay is very stable with most edge cases tested and regression tested with each update. I made the following additions to Game Fabric:

  1. User Profile Tile (2x1)
  2. User Stats Tile (1x1)
  3. Leaderboard Tile (demoted to 1x1)

1. User Profile Tile

I decided it might be nice to have a place to go to for each user. Not only from a ‘who am I’ stand point but also, who am I playing with. This may seem like redundant to Xbox Live functionality but think about this. How many Xbox games do you see this capability in? It’s in the Xbox live tile, but do you as a game developer get any ad revenue from users leaving your app? Nope? Didn’t think so. If you bring the Xbox live experience into your app, you get more ad revenue. Time will tell, but I suspect that ad revenue from the meta-experience provided by game fabric will be a sizeable chunk of the overall revenue from each game. I have setup separate ad-units to track this and will post my findings periodically after launch.

2. User Stats Tile

Again, more self discovery features. This time specific to the game you are inside. Each game can define its own ‘game events’. This game events can either be transactional (meaning you log them during game play using Game Fabric web services) or calculated (meaning they are calculated from an expression composed of other game events.

Calculated Events

In Euchre I track game-won and game-played. I created a calculated game event that has the expression: “game-won / game-played”. The result is a percentage of games the user won.

Groups & Sort Order

I also provide a couple columns to allow the game developer to control the sort order and position within the user stats page. The user stats page renders completely dynamically based on the game and the metadata pulled from the game event configuration specified by the game developer. Next, I want to provide a FormatString to allow you to control how the value is rendered in the stats page.

3. Leaderboard Tile

This doesn’t do much right now but now that I have the user stats working from a transactional and aggregation stand point I think adding the services around showing ranked users will only be a couple hours of work.