As promised in numerous threads we are going to show, for the first time, our Panel. Well that's what we call it anyways. Basically it's like our version of iGoogle coded for us to keep tabs on all our games. An admin panel is nice but when you start running multiple games it gets tedious to login to every panel to see what's going on. We needed something to summarize the data and "at a glance" see what is going on, this allows us to act as quick as possible to any situation that may arise in the games.
As of this writing all the games are now hosted on the same server so the data pulled is easy to grab by just querying the different tables in the database. We also have a JSON plug-in where the panel will pull data from a JSON script which allows us to plug the panel into games that may not be running on our server.
First screen shot is the main page, all the information about turn purchases or point purchases in our games has been removed. Sorry we are not going to divulge our income
~ The Plus signs allow us to shrink the game info into a bar (like the CyberStryke at the bottom of the page). The blocks are also drag and drop to change the order in any way we see fit. The order is stored in a cookie so my partner and I can order the things as we like to see them. When my partner runs an ad campaign she'll normally keep that game at the top of list. When I make a code update or release a alpha/beta I keep that game at the top. Since we don't use the same forum software on each game I created 3 functions for the forums to grab the latest topics (phpBB, SMF and our own custom forums). One thing I would like to point out here is each of our games has both an Admin mailbox and our individual game account mail boxes (hence the admin/codestryke messages). The message center code I created allows for mailboxes to be separate from the player account. To me this has always been a must, if our staff or admin's want to play the game that is fine but we would like them to use one login for there admin / staff responsibilities. This allows the players to "know" there admins, without them possibly changing there name every round.
At the top is our menu, Home is of course this page, the next item is our sales data (numbers, again, have been removed). The sales page lets us know what each game is earning in a nice graphical manner. The graphs are provided by a freely available graphics flash plug in I found long time ago
Next is what we call the IMS (Issue Management System). Basically a bug tracker. Each games admin panel has the IMS in it for that game which allows our other admins/staff to report bugs for that game. All the information goes to one database and this page is a summary of all the games and issues or bugs that either resolved or need to be resolved.
Final page is our Reseller's page. When we run ads we want to know how many signups we got and how long they continued to play. This is taken for our game State of Crime (SOC) which we've only run one specific ad for (again not wanting to give away to many of our secrets LOL, actually we don't want to give false hope on any specific ad network every ones returns will vary). Most of SOC's referral signups come from an all-in-one ad where we are marketing the eXtremeCast Games network. This is my partner's favorite page. This report is not auto calculated because ad campaigns are not run all the time so I just added a link to refresh the data which works out better and saves the server a bit.
What you have seen is a culmination of over 5 years of work. I didn't start out this way, nor were all the pages created at one time. It's all been a journey to get to this point and creating things on as add needed basis. As Bill Gates once touted "Information at your finger tips" and it's true the more data you can take in for running your games the better. This is why we've had players following our games for near a decade
