um hi everybody i'm jimmy i'm the
co-founder and cto of pocket worlds
where highrise and we built high-rise
the app which is available on ios and
android and i think to date it has over
5 million downloads and we're grossing
over a million a month in revenue
so today i'm going to walk you guys
through um the process of designing and
building an mmo game in this era of
mobile apps and social networks
i'll talk about the architectural design
decisions that we made that enables
highrise to feel
simultaneously like an app and also a
game and why that's really important
i'll also talk about our vision as
pocket worlds and how we plan to
leverage the high-rise architecture to
create more exciting social first games
experiences and worlds
so for those that are not familiar
high-rise is a social first design mmo
so player players come in they design an
avatar they build an apartment they go
into this fully user-generated world to
visit other people's faces
and take part in challenges
the unique part of high-rise and the
hi-res experience compared to the
multitude of games that you see in the
app store is our design philosophy that
we call social first
so with traditional game design you
often have a game designer that would
come up with a game a mini game concept
and then would build out a metagame loop
and finally sprinkle in some social
features like clans inbox marketplace
as almost an afterthought
under the social first philosophy what
we do is we start with the messenger a
news feed for community
guilds profiles an economy and a vibrant
world and then we add in the game
in the case of highrise that game is a
straightforward fashion contest where
you design outfits and compete with
other players
the core part of why social first works
is that it solves the critical piece
that's missing in most all mobile games
today
which is the issue of long-term
attention
a player joins highrise for the design
game
but they really ultimately stay for the
friends they meet in our world
but as you can see kind of from the
screenshots on the left our heavy focus
on social features
really require a us that feels like an
app very much like snapchat or instagram
otherwise users will come in
um play the game make their friends and
then really move to those other
platforms once they're done
and kind of gotten everything they can
out of the game
and that's precisely what we saw in the
early days of highrise
so to achieve that user experience we
really
realized that we must leverage the ui
capabilities native to ios and android
and could not rely on anything that game
engines like unity can offer
there's just really no way that unity
could compete with apple's 40 years of
experience perfecting fonts and ui
animations
so the architecture that we came up with
actually mirrors our products position
of being percent app and fifty percent
gain
it is fifty percent swift
and colin on the android side and fifty
percent c plus plus
the swift component handles all ui
to create the silky smooth native field
and the c plus component handles the
game engine the world the avatars
business logic and is shared as a
sub module between ios and android
the components are seamlessly integrated
via a system of bridges that are
separated by feature which creates a
nice little
micro services architecture that we can
swap components in and out of
the bridging
between the components is achieved using
objective c plus on the ios side and jni
on android
and the secondary objective here is of
course to offload as much of the heavy
lifting as possible into the core
um to help with crop cross-platform
development which we were able to
achieve
so i think what's more interesting is
that this architecture really enables us
to create different games and products
that offer different experiences by
swapping out the mini and the metagame
of highrise with something else so maybe
um i'm thinking like a hero collector
where you're walking around in our
virtual world collecting monsters to do
battle with with the exact same avatar
world messenger guild system as
high-rise
or an adventure fishing game
but you know the possibilities are
really endless as we're not only
offering the game as the core attraction
but rather the social experience as a
whole
so in the interest of time i'm not going
to dig too deep into the nitty-gritty
details of our implementation but i
would like to summarize what we talked
about today
which is highrise is a social first game
that is 50 app and 50 game
it is built on an architecture that
leverages the silky smooth ux of native
ui and the power of a real game engine
and we at pocket worlds is looking to
take this architecture to the next level
by building more experiences and games
that are social first by design
so i'll wrap things up by talking a
little bit about our company
we are entirely remote and we have been
remote for four years so we are ahead of
the curve
and we're doing very well we just closed
a serious a to build out more games and
worlds and we're looking to grow our
entire team with lots of open positions
so if you're interested in building
amazing games and crafting worlds with
us
please email me directly at jay at
highh.rs or check out our website at
pocketworlds.com
thanks