Kawaii High School

Inspiration

I decided to build Kawaii High for this competition based on my community’s long-standing request for a Kawaii school sandbox. When Meta released the new Social API, I had a lightbulb moment. This was the chance to design a game where friendship is the core progression system. My goal was to create a space that feels familiar yet unique, where players can express their style, write their own stories, and unlock fun new roles and cosmetics simply by spending time together.

What it does

Kawaii High is a mobile-first dress-up role-play simulator where players decide who they want to be and level up through social play. Everyone begins as a student and can customize their look with over 120 unique clothing items at launch, with tons more coming during live-ops. Popularity is earned by hanging out with friends and completing collaborative “assignments.” School Spirit is earned by helping the school, returning binders and cleaning up trash. As players progress, they unlock premium roles like Cheerleader, Athlete, and Theater Kid or become faculty where they can use they choose what it means to be a Teacher or even the Principal. There are 16 rooms to explore, quests to complete, leaderboards to climb, and field trips to other Kawaii Worlds for bonus rewards. It’s designed to be fun whether players want to chase goals or just dress up and socialize.

How we built it

Kawaii High was built in the Horizon Desktop Editor with over 10,000 lines of TypeScript powering the game. Much of the clothing was initially generated with Meta's Clothing Gen AI, accelerating style variations and allowing me to build a massive wardrobe. The details were hand-finished in Procreate and assembled in Canva. I also used Audio Gen AI for the entire soundscape of Kawaii High.

What we learned

I learned how to combine multiple progression systems with expressive social play while using Meta AI tools to increase scale without sacrificing style.

Accomplishments that we're proud of and Challenges we ran into

Creating our studio's largest world yet while coordinating 16 rooms, 120+ wearable items, and dozens of quests on such an accelerated timeline was a major challenge but it resulted in a strong foundation for Kawaii High. Time restrictions precluded me from completing significant testing and adding IWP offerings.

What's next for Kawaii High School

This launch version is built to scale, allowing us to continuously expand and refine the experience based on what our community enjoys most. I dreamed bigger than what's possible in the current engine with the intention to 3x the player count in Horizon Engine along with incorporating Noesis. I focused on delivering the core systems first, and over the next few months, I’ll experiment with new role-play interactions to see what resonates best with players utilizing Turbo analytics and our community.