Highrise is a social-first game, built on an architecture that combines a smooth user experience with the capabilities of a real game engine.

In designing Highrise, we focused on creating an experience that feels like both an app and a game, which is crucial for user engagement.

Pocket Worlds is looking to enhance this architecture by developing more social-first experiences and games.

Our architecture is a blend of 50% app and 50% game, utilizing Swift and Kotlin for Android, and C++ for the game engine.

We learned from early experiences that players would leave Highrise for other platforms once they exhausted the game's content, highlighting the need for a strong social component.

To maintain user engagement, Highrise must feel like a social app, similar to Snapchat or Instagram, to prevent users from leaving after gameplay.

Highrise is a social-first MMO where players create avatars, build apartments, and engage in user-generated worlds and challenges.

The future of gaming will involve seamless experiences where players can transition between different games and environments, interacting with content created by various developers.

We have a microservices architecture that allows us to swap components in and out easily, using Objective-C++ on iOS and JNI on Android for bridging.