My journey of WZ, and the start of visualizing its data
In The Beginning
It started out with an YouTube video.
I was browsing for a Boom Beach video by nickatnyte, because I had just downloaded it and was curious about the strategies. At that time he had uploaded a video of a new game which he was a part of during Beta, and it was a game called World Zombination.
At the time the video was out, the global launch of World Zombination was just about to come out, so after watching the video, I decided to download the game and try it out. I created an account, picked the survivors side, played a few tutorial sessions and loved the game. Then I saw an option to join a new guild, so I thought I'd try it out. I couldn't remember the name of the first guild I joined, but I do remember the excitement of sharing every little bit of new strategy I learned while playing the game. Unfortunately the guild was very inactive and I soon found myself being the only one online in the guild. I was level 8 at the time and thought it was time to move on.
Then I found the Unholy Angels guild.
JonnyTran was the leader at the time, and he was a very energetic leader. He assured me that the guild was very active and that I would have a good time with them. Then for the first time I saw a different side of World Zombination, the social nature of being in a guild, and the need to constantly prune the member list to maintain momentum of the guild experience points. To succeed in the guild, it was important to keep up with the number of cans required to raid. I found myself trying to maximize my cans production with the minimum Team Power required, because I didn't have strong enough units.
Questions Started Forming
At that point, I started asking myself a simple question.
"How many cans will I net in each of the cities, and the difficulties?"
I knew immediately when I asked that question, that I would use Tableau to help me visualize the data. I have been using Tableau for a number of years at this point, and wanted to finally use interesting data to help me with a simple question.
The Process
The first thing I looked for was data that was easily accessible. WZ had information of all the cities listed, so it was easy to collect the Team Power, and the number of cans required per city, per difficult. This is an example of Lima:
For the normal difficulty, it required 150 team power, and cost 280 cans to fight. At the time that I started collecting the data, I had more than enough unit power to fight this city, but the question was always how to maximize my profit by utilizing all of my units, and have them fight at cities with team power requirements would match their combined powers.
One by one, I went through the cities and all the different splash screens to collect the team power required, and stored the data in Excel. Then I used Tableau Public Desktop to connect to the spreadsheet, and came up with this:
Having gotten that first dashboard created, I moved on to collecting the net yield of cans per city, per difficulty. This was a more challenging task, because the number of cans received is only displayed after a fight is successful in that particular city. With low powered units, I couldn't manual fight or quick fight cities like Manila at Hard or Expert, so it took a lot longer to get. Luckily, as I started posting the visualizations in the Proletariat Forums, people started to help out with the data, and then I ended up with this:
Iterate, Then Try Again
If it's not useful, no one will use it
Up until this point, I thought I had provided a somewhat useful dashboard that would prove to be useful, but I don't think it was really something that people checked out very often. I reflected often on the value my visualizations provided, and thought about the main Zens of creating visual dashboards:
- Usefulness of the visualization
- Simplicity over complexity
Are the dashboards that I've created really easy to use? Looking at the number of dropdowns and legends required to explain the pictures, how easy is it to understand at a glance what the data is portraying? The number of views of these visualizations was good evidence that it was not something captivating: The visualizations have been created for over 4 months, and only about 800 views. People are not coming back to view the data.
Finding the sweet spot
I iterated over and over on what really would be useful for the audience that I am trying to reach out to, and played around with a lot of different data. I found success when I realized that there was pretty much always chatter after the 3.3 update, when they introduced Daily Hunts/Assignments. Questions of "Where can I find sprayers?" were common, and also common were replies of "I am not sure, try Nairobi?".
At that point there were also many others who started to post their findings on the forum, but they were not always complete, and wasn't easy to follow along. So I collected the data from Rogue_Redux and bluetigger, and embarked on my own little project to make this something useful for everyone who plays the game.
Picture is worth a thousand words
I had a couple of options, and decided this time, to do away with dropdowns. No more looking for different ways to set the filters, when all they wanted was to find the zombies to kill and where the city was to find them.
I scoured the web and found the World Zombination Wiki, which was a very useful site with the images of all the units. The bonus was that the background was removed as well, so the borders of unit images were actually shaped like the units. Again using Tableau, I used the images as the filters, to create an interactive map. (I will have a separate blog post about how I made the map). This is the end result:
The usefulness of this interactive map was validated when Gordon included this post in the World Zombination newsletter, and there were general buzz around the usefulness of this map. The success here was because I found two key ingredients:
- People really wanted to know where to find those specific units to help them with the daily assignments
- Images are more attractive than text
- One click vs. many to get the answer
What This All Means To Me
I began this journey of collecting data and visualizing it because I felt passionate about the game. It was the first time I ever invested this much time in a game, and most of the time spent was outside of actually playing the game. The motivations were the guild chats, and also the participation in the forums. I keep finding different types of data that can be useful for the players, but because they are subtle, often times their usefulness is not apparent. Once that data can be visualized, then it brings a whole new dimension of the game to the players, and developers alike.
For me, I see a big opportunity to bridge the gap of the game data, and the players of the game. Using data to help formulate strategies is a long standard practice for those who are willing the spend the time and investment. However, that is not always possible for the casual players who will miss out on these opportunities.
Helping gaming communities see and understand their data, to help them enjoy their game more, and to help bring them an enriched experience of the games, is the ultimate goal which I wish to achieve.
