June's Journey is the world's top-grossing hidden object game, having surpassed $1 billion USD total revenue in November 2023. During my time on the project between 2019 and 2024, our daily revenue increased x8, and the UI/UX team grew from 3 designers at the start to a total of 13 full time designers near the end.
Toolstack: Unity, Photoshop, Adobe XD, JIRA, Confluence, Miro
"Announcements" Mailbox Feature
The "Announcements" is an addition to the existing Mailbox feature in the game, designed to allow our community team to let players know about promotions, ongoing events in the game, or other relevant news.
I designed several different layouts that the Live Ops team could use, depending on the type of message (beginning of a new seasonal set, a special event promo, etc.)
"Secrets" Feature
Prototype of end-of-game sequence
Final in-game animation
"Secrets" allows players to play side-story content and also experience a more competitive style of play. The main goal is to play consecutive games in a row without losing, allowing the player to increase their win streak which gives them faster and faster story progression.
I was involved with many parts of the feature, from defining the general theme to designing several screens, including the important win streak sequence at the end of gameplay. I also ran an extensive usertest in collaboration with Playtika's BizDom team, which allowed us to fix some issues with the messaging and userflow of the feature's initial design.
"Island Beautifications" Feature
In-game implementation
"Island Beautifications" allows players to place hard-to-earn special "items" in pre-defined zones around the island. I completely redesigned the initial interface and came up with a sliding panel that allows the player to scroll through all available "beautifications" for a zone, or quickly move between zones.
I also proposed a special "map" screen to give players an overview of all available zones but this ended up getting cut due to time constraints.
I created extensive and highly interactive prototypes to test the entire feature before we moved to the UI stage, and ran in-house "kitchen tests" to verify that the interface was intuitive and easy to use.
Each zone needed a thumbnail image showing its "empty" state, and each beautification needed a corresponding image showing it placed in the environment - these images are also used when advertising the beautification to the player and should create the feeling of a beautiful, highly valuable object.
I created the initial set of thumbnails, and also defined and documented the art style and workflow, so that other designers could take over creating more thumbnails in the future.
Extended IAP Store Card
Claire's Chronicles was an in-development title that entered soft launch in early 2025 and was eventually cancelled in May 2025. I was invited to join the team in March 2024, as the game was just exiting pre-production, with only the core gameplay and a handful of very basic functionality already implemented.
During my time on the project, I developed the UI for several core features, and was feature owner for the Win Streak.
Win Streak
The Win Streak gives the player increasing gameplay bonuses, as long as they don't lose a game. Each "step" on the track adds another bonus, until the player maxes it out.
I served as a feature owner and was heavily involved in every part of development, from the planning and organisation, to ensuring correct implementation of the game design, developing the art theme, and leading a team of artists to create the final assets and gameplay animations.
I also was responsible for the UI/UX and created all UI assets, and implemented the feature in Unity. The implementation allowed the reward track to be completely flexible, seamlessly expanding to accommodate any number of additional "steps", and all states of the UI were handled by an animator state machine that required minimal input from developers.
The "bonus granting" UI animation
In addition to developing the theme of the feature, I lead a team of an animator and a VFX artist to create the final in-game animation of the win streak.
Island Context Menu
Claire's Chronicles has an island decoration system similar to June's Journey, allowing the player to freely place items anywhere they want. The system of Claire's has a few additional features, such as allowing the player to change the color of the decoration, or upgrade larger items to a more expensive, elaborate version.
I designed the interface for this system, starting off by replicating the system from June's and then building on that foundation.
Work-in-progress Unity implementation
"Find Item" Game Levels
Some gameplay levels have unique story significance. One such level requires the player to find and collect a special card that a represents a clue or an item. I designed the card icon, worked with a VFX artist to create its pickup animation and animated the end sequence of the "Item Found!" animation myself.
Prototype of the whole sequence
"Item Found" animation
