Casual mobile game about managing your mental health.

About

Ensemble Interactive (5 People)

January 2024 - August 2025

Lead Programmer

Unity

Wellness Hero started as a paper prototype and evolved into an app that gamifies the management of your mental health. Although still a WIP, programming Wellness Hero has been a journey through aspects of development I had previously not touched, such as Editor Debugs, CSV reading, and FTUE Analytics.

The main view.

Various systems at work.

Contributions

Gameplay Systems

  • Leveraged Unity's Event Trigger system to create draggable 'badges' that are used for many aspects of the game.
  • Created 'towers' that hold necessary information and represent different goals.
  • Implemented an energy system to recalculate the flow of energy whenever a new connection between towers is created or destroyed.
  • Implemented all UI and tower interactions.
  • Designed a tracker in charge of managing your daily, weekly, and lifetime progress.

Showcase of additional contributions.

Backend Systems

  • Created a script to read from a CSV and output custom Scriptable Objects. Storing information about specific events, settings, and abilities is as simple as adding it to a spreadsheet.
  • Created a save system that allows for easy modularity.

Additional Contributions

  • Implemented shaders to allow for smooth transitions between materials, used for the color/sprite-shifting background.
  • Setup and managed Unity Analytics to view and adjust player FTUE.

What I Learned

Wellness Hero is a project that could have benefited from how much knowledge I have of backend systems now compared to back then. Most of my experience leading up to Wellness Hero was in programming for more gameplay-oriented systems, and it took a lot of effort for me to see the value in some of the tools that we were eventually thankful for. Nowadays, I have made leaps in my ability to determine if we need a tool, what that tool should do, and how someone should interact with that tool to make their life as easy as possible.

I would love to create something with the mission to impact the player positively like Wellness Hero again.