Happy Clinic
About the game
Happy Clinic is a time management game with a renovate metagame.
In the core gameplay, the Player controls the nurse, bringing items to doctors so that they can complete the treatments before the time runs out. As the player completes levels, She builds an increasingly big Research Center, which then unlocks new mechanics in the gameplay eventually leading Her to new locations.
In addition, She can follow the professional and private life of the nurse with the Memories, a soft storytelling tool.
What I worked on
I joined the project when it was already in the soft launch stage, my main responsibility was that of a Game Designer and Producer, as in the company organization those two figures often overlap.
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I worked on Live Ops design and balancing. From concept to release and post-launch tweaks.
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I worked on Live Support, following new locations and new features from brainstorming to balancing and playtesting.
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I managed A/B tests and monetization design, interfacing with the store management and the analytics departments.
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I was assigned ownership of the project from, the two teams of developers, to QA, to App Store Optimization and Community Management
Challenges
This project had a few peculiarities for me besides being the first professional project I participated in. The first one was that the team was divided into two different offices, and the second one was that I joined once the main design was already designed, developed, and released. These two points among different others brought some new challenges to overcome and to learn from:
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- The design team was divided not only by distance but also by language. The other part of the team was in fact Russian speaking, and only a handful of members spoke fluently English. This meant having a great part of the documentation in Russian and having to rely on particular members of the team to deliver concepts to artists and programmers. This taught me to be especially clear and concise in the documentation I produced, more than I have ever been before so that these exchanges could happen at the best of possibilities.
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- Differently from the previous academic and hobbyist experience I had before, the features I designed for this game had to be actually released to a considerate audience of players. Moreover, until this moment I didn't have a more experienced figure approving or discarding my designs. This led me to start thinking of developing times in a different way and to make the most of the constructive feedback I received.
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- Speaking of the player audience, this was also the first time for me to work on a project with users already enjoying it. As a consequence, the design decisions had to take into consideration not only the new player's experience but also that of already existing players who were receiving the update. Almost every problem had in fact two ways of looking at it and finding the best solution for both of them proved to be a great time to explore my growth opportunity as a designer.
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