Life on the Edge: Analytics Engine
Built a game analytics engine that tracks player behaviour in an educational game, turning gameplay data into measurable learning outcomes for researchers and educators.
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The Problem
Life on the Edge is an educational tower defense game designed to teach cell biology. The game itself was effective at engaging students, but the team at MacEwan University had no way to measure how players were learning. Were students just memorizing patterns, or were they developing genuine understanding of cellular processes? Without data, the educational claims remained anecdotal.
What I Built
I designed and built a game analytics engine that instruments player behaviour and maps it to measurable learning outcomes. The system operates in three stages:
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Event Ingestion — The game client emits timestamped events for every player action: structure placements, upgrade decisions, defensive strategies, resource management choices. These flow into a REST API for batch processing.
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Behaviour Analysis — The engine tracks session-level patterns — which strategies players attempt, how they adapt to different pathogen types, where they struggle, and how their approach evolves across levels. This goes beyond simple metrics like "time played" to capture decision-making patterns.
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Learning Outcome Mapping — The core contribution: translating gameplay behaviour into educational metrics. A player who experiments with membrane configurations before finding a solution demonstrates different learning than one who memorizes a walkthrough. The engine quantifies this distinction.
The system also powers per-level leaderboards, giving students competitive motivation while giving educators visibility into class-wide learning patterns.
Technologies
Game analytics API (REST), event-driven architecture, session tracking, behavioural pattern analysis, data aggregation pipelines, leaderboard system.
Outcome
Researchers at MacEwan University now use the analytics data to conduct efficacy studies on game-based learning. Educators can see which concepts students grasp quickly and where they struggle, allowing targeted intervention. The game is available on Steam and is actively used in university biology courses across Canada.