Hey y’all! Manjee here again, this time for a retrospective on one of our favorite features we’ve ever shipped: HR Highlights! 
The Background
No joke: for years, the same thing has happened over and over again.
Y’all suggest a Highrise version of Spotify Wrapped 
we get super hyped about it we realize it’s already mid-December cue the panic and sorrow, in quick succession we decide there’s just no time to build it properly give up and say, “Maybe next year!”
But this year… something was in the air. Call it love, call it desperation? Suddenly, our product team and engineers were determined to get this feature out for real, and began what turned into an epic 5-day hackathon-style journey to finally get our own version of Wrapped to you.
In this week’s Dev Diary, take a peek behind the scenes at the creative process!
First, be sure to check out your own Highrise Highlights!
Highlights is a tappable slideshow of your year on Highrise.
Open it from a special HUD in your Homeroom. Once you tap in, you’ll see a series of cards that walk you through your year:
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Social stats: check out your four top besties, your total posts, likes, and DMs sent
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Cosmetic stats: what you wore, collected, and expressed yourself with
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Eventing stats: how you showed up in events, rooms, and worlds
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Gold stats: how much you earned and sold on the Marketplace
Share your wrap-up on the feed! Highlights will be available until the end of the year and will expire on December 31st at 11:59 PM. 
Designing Highlights
When we started designing Highlights, the first question was, “What actually matters about a year in Highrise?”
There were tons of things we could have focused on: hours spent in your closet versus how many outfits you actually wore; miles scrolled on the feed; how many Bubbles you hoarded.
But, whenever we speak with actual players, we consistently hear the same thing: it’s your friends that keep you coming back. Highrise has dress-up elements, competitive gameplay, creative outlets, and so much more… but at its core, it’s social-first. So, that’s what we decided to spotlight.
Your People
The most-shared screen of all your highlights has been Your Squad. 
These were the players with whom you had the most frequent interactions and shared the most time. Here’s what determined your Squad:
- Time spent in a room together
- DMs exchanged
- Time spent in calls together
This screen was the most important, so we spent a ton of time refining it to make sure we got it right and actually spotlighted your main ride-or-dies.
Cofounder @dajakeness’s squad this year!
Next, we love to see your People Met stat! This number shows how many unique people you shared a room or world with this year. It’s a simple, often surprisingly high number; we saw tons of folks with People Met stats in the tens of thousands. 
It goes to show just how big our little community has gotten!
Outfits: A work in progress!
We really wanted to actually show your favorite outfits… but as you know, this one didn’t quite make it to the finish line.
We did some early exploration into detecting outfits you wore the most, or the ones that got you the most compliments/engagement… but given the time we had, it just wasn’t realistic to build this particular screen in a way that was both accurate and polished.
So, we simplified the Outfits screen and just captured your total unique fits instead.
Looking ahead…
Now that we have the base Highlights system in place, we’re in a much better position to ship a full outfit highlight reel in future years. This is just the beginning!
A very cursed example of what happens when things “break.” Full outfits would render incomplete or inaccurate, which kind of defeats the whole purpose. Next year… we’ll have pants.
What NOT to show
Your Highlights cover a ton of personal info pertaining to your Gold, friends, and total activity. While it’s super fun to share your Highlights, we had to be intentional about the final, shareable compilation of all your most impressive stats.
For the summary screen, we focused on stats that were fun to show off, not too revealing, and also were representative of your actual game experience.
We deliberately avoided super-sensitive or specific personal details; this is why your summary screen doesn’t show your Squad or Gold earned.
Sharing Highlights should be a quick press of a button, free from worry or the need to edit out personal info.
How we actually built it
Truly, we have talked about this every year. In order to actually get this horse off to the races (in good health and with a full belly of hay), our team treated Highlights like a mini internal hackathon. If you’re not in the dev world, a hackathon is basically a super-focused, single-minded crunch. Multiple folks come together to get a feature (that would normally take weeks) shipped in days.
During this process:
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We leaned on the Web Team to help us get prototypes done fast. The reason Highlights lives on the website is because building this feature in-app would have been significantly more difficult and resource-intensive.
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We worked closely with the data team to figure out which stats we could reliably pull from our systems without breaking anything.
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We iterated on which stats felt most “Highrise” to land on the social and gameplay stats that made it to the final cut.
Now that the pipelines and basic experience exist, we can iterate way earlier for 2026 and beyond!
Start noodling on what you wanna see next year! You know where to go: the #highrise-feedback channel on Discord is always open for conversation.
Your Highlights
Scrolling through everyone’s Highlights internally has been nothing short of incredible and genuinely heart-warming. 
We spend our days debating UI layouts, fixing bugs, tuning events, and writing copy. It’s easy to get lost in the details and forget what it all adds up to: a tight-knit community of friends, inside jokes, and another year’s worth of memories created together.
What’s next?
This is only version 1 of Highrise Highlights!
Now that the core experience is live, we’re excited to:
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Explore richer cosmetic stats (including outfits
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Add more social storytelling to your slides
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Refine which stats feel most meaningful and fun to show off
In the meantime:
Go check out your Highlights, share them, and see what your friends’ years looked like!
And maybe start thinking: what will you want your 2026 Highlights to say about you? 