MMOs in the Instagram Era: Highrise - YC Gaming Tech Talks 2020

Highrise lets players design avatars and apartments, visit user-created spaces, and join challenges. Jimmy says its social-first approach starts with features such as messaging, a community feed, profiles, guilds, and an economy, then adds a game: a fashion contest.

Jimmy says players may arrive for the design game but stay for the friends they meet. Early on, players who had made friends moved to platforms such as Snapchat or Instagram, so Highrise needed an app-like experience to keep social activity in its own product.

Highrise uses Swift on iOS and Kotlin on Android for native interfaces, alongside a shared C++ core for the game world, avatars, and business logic. Feature-based bridges connect the components through Objective-C++ on iOS and JNI on Android, helping the team reuse core functionality across platforms.

The architecture lets Pocket Worlds replace Highrise’s minigame and metagame while retaining its avatar world, messaging, and guild system. Jimmy gives a hero collector and an adventure fishing game as possible examples.

Jimmy summarizes Highrise as half app and half game, combining native UI with a game engine. He says Pocket Worlds had recently closed a Series A to build more games and worlds, and that the company was remote and hiring.