I got an internship in Happy Elements in Dec. 2010, and Lounge Bar was the first project I participated in. Lounge Bar is a typical SIM game: players own a small bar at the beginning. They can decorate their bar and learn new recipes of cocktails and desserts to attract more and more customers and earn more money.
Lounge Bar is on Mixi, a primary social network of Japan, facebook and Kaixin. It started operation in Feb. 2009. As a 1-year-old game, Lounge Bar contained some technical issues, lots of brilliant ideas were confined. So we must design new cool features and be feasible in programming. Our team was not large, so a brainstorm was easily undertaken. Working in a team and learning from other members, I not only gained idea of how to design a feature and wireframe, but also learned to be patient and collaborative.
At the beginning of my internship, I needed to fit in the team and got to know the entire of teamwork. It's different from those projects I had done by myself when I was in the university. In a team, everyone has his / her own responsibilities. As a product manager, most of my works needed to talk with other members in terms of explaining to programmers about what the feature was, how to use it and all of the interactive details, discussing with graphic designers on how to make a UI more friendly and comfortable.
I designed two extremely successful features of this game: Decoration Upgrading System (you will see one of my sketches of this system blow) and Special Guest. The former one continuously improve Lounge Bar's revenue on Mixi, easy to reuse; and the later one reversed the decline of Lounger Bar's DAU (Daily Active User).
Thanks to Lounge Bar Team, I thought I learned a lot from them. I know how to make a user friendly UI, how to use relevant software, such as Axure, Visio, Balsamiq, etc. how to analyze data and, more importantly, how to work effectively in a team.