Lexica is a massive tablet game (3.5 GB, 300 Staff Years of work) that is designed to get junior high kids excited about reading. In this talk, Jesse Schell gives an overview of it, and details the problems (and solutions) of dealing with such a large game app on iOS.

1. The Making of Lexica
A Truly Massive Tablet Game
Jesse Schell
@jesseschell
GDC 2015

4. Problem:
• Many kids start opting out of reading in middle school.
Transformational Goal:
•Get them to become lifelong readers.

5. Lexica Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj9AWWWBA_w

14. Tyger Cadenc
e
Emma Tom
Cheshire Heidi Lumen Marian
Nemo
Raven Baba Yaga
Telltale

26. The Secret Garden
The Secret Sharer
The Shadow-Line
The Sign of the Four
The Song of the Lark
The Story Girl
The Story of the Amulet
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde
The Swiss Family Robinson
The Talented Tenth: The Negro
Problem
The Thirty-Nine Steps
The Three Musketeers
The Time Machine
The Tin Woodman of Oz
The War of the Worlds
The Warlord of Mars
The Witch of Atlas
The Woman in White
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe
Three Ghost Stories
Through the Looking-Glass
Thuvia, Maid of Mars
Tik-Tok of Oz
Tom Sawyer, Detective
Treasure Island
Twenty Thousand Leagues
Under the Sea
Twice-Told Tales
Two Years Before the Mast
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Understood Betsy
Up From Slavery: An
Autobiography
Walden and Civil
Disobedience
White Fang
Woman's Work in the Civil
War: A Record of Heroism,
Patriotism and Patience
Wuthering Heights
The Lost Princess of Oz
The Lost World
The Magic of Oz
The Magnificent Ambersons
The Man in the Iron Mask
The Man Who Was Thursday:
A Nightmare
The Man Who Would Be King
The Marvelous Land of Oz
The Master of the World
The Memoirs of Sherlock
Holmes
The Moon and Sixpence
The Moonstone
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The Mysterious Island
The Mysterious Stranger
The Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym of Nantucket
The Patchwork Girl of Oz
The Pathfinder
The People That Time Forgot
The Phoenix and the Carpet
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Pioneers
The Prairie
The Prince and the Pauper
The Princess and Curdie
The Prisoner of Zenda
The Railway Children
The Red Badge of Courage
The Red House Mystery
The Red Room
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner
The Rise of Silas Lapham
The Road to Oz
The Scarecrow of Oz
The Scarlet Pimpernel
The Sea-Hawk
The Sea-Wolf
The Second Jungle Book
The Secret Adversary
A Boy's Will
A Christmas Carol
A Confederate Girl's Diary
A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court
A House of Pomegranates
A Journal of the Plague Year
A Journey to the Center of the
Earth
A Lady's Life in the Rocky
Mountains
A Little Princess
A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Princess of Mars
A Study in Scarlet
A Tale of Two Cities
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Allan and the Holy Flower
Allan Quatermain
Allan's Wife
American Poetry
Anne of Avonlea
Anne of Green Gables
Anne of the Island
Anne's House of Dreams
Ayesha: The Return of She
Before Adam
Black Beauty
Captain Blood
Captains Courageous
Child of Storm
Crome Yellow
Cyrano de Bergerac
David Copperfield
Declaration of Independence
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
Dracula
Dracula's Guest
Dubliners
Eight Hundred Leagues on the
Amazon
Emma
Ethan Frome
Fifty-One Tales
Finished
Five Children and It
Flappers and Philosophers
Frankenstein
Further Chronicles of Avonlea
Glinda of Oz
Great Expectations
Greenmantle
Gulliver's Travels
Hans Brinker; or, The Silver
Skates
Heidi
Howards End
Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl
Ivanhoe
Jane Eyre
Jungle Tales of Tarzan
Kazan
Kidnapped
Kilmeny of the Orchard
Kim
King Arthur and the Knights of
the Round Table
King Solomon's Mines
Life on the Mississippi
Little Men
Little Women
Main Street
Maiwa's Revenge; or, The War
of the Little Hand
Martin Eden
Mistress Wilding
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
Mosses from an Old Manse
and Other Stories
My Ántonia
My Father's Dragon
Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass
New Arabian Nights
Northanger Abbey
O Pioneers!
Old Mother West Wind
Oliver Twist
One of Ours
Otto of the Silver Hand
Out of Time's Abyss
Ozma of Oz
Parnassus on Wheels
Pellucidar
Penrod
Penrod and Sam
Persuasion
Peter Pan
Phantasmagoria and
Other Poems
Poems by Emily Dickinson
Poems of William Blake
Pollyanna
Pollyanna Grows Up
Pride and Prejudice
Prufrock and Other
Observations
Pygmalion
Rebecca of Sunnybrook
Farm
Riders of the Purple Sage
Rinkitink in Oz
Robinson Crusoe
Robur the Conqueror; or,
The Clipper of the Clouds
Roughing It
Scaramouche
Sense and Sensibility
Seventeen
She
She and Allan
Shirley
Silas Marner
Snowdrop and Other Tales
South Sea Tales
South Wind
South!
Spoon River Anthology
Summer
Tales of Space and Time
Tales of the Jazz Age
Tarzan of the Apes
The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn
The Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Ancient Allan
The Arabian Nights
The Autobiography of
Benjamin Franklin
The Book of Wonder
The Boy Scouts Book of Stories
The Call of the Wild
The Castle of Otranto
The Chessmen of Mars
The Chronicles of Clovis
The Circular Staircase
The Coral Island
The Country of the Pointed
Firs
The Deerslayer
The Emerald City of Oz
The Every-Day Life of
Abraham Lincoln
The First Men in the Moon
The Four Million
The Farther Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe
The Gettysburg Address
The Gift of the Magi
The Gods of Mars
The Golden Road
The Haunted Bookshop
The Hound of the Baskervilles
The House of Seven Gables
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
The Hunting of the Snark
The Invisible Man
The Iron Heel
The Ivory Child
The Jungle Book
The Land That Time Forgot
The Last of the Mohicans
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
The Light Princess
The Lion's Skin
The Lone Star Ranger

32. Weekly Live Content Schedule

33. Nine Transformational Methods
1. Immerse them in an engaging story about mindset theory
2. Let them become friends with intriguing and engaging characters from
the world of literature
3. Help them build vocabulary, syntax knowledge, and reading fluency
4. Engage them in a story that exercises their reading skills
5. Lead them to gateway books
6. Help them make time to read
7. Incentivize reading (gently)
8. Let them see that their classmates read
9. Let them experience the joy of writing

34. 20+ APPS
500K LOC
3 GB

36. Problems…

37. …and Solutions!

38. Problem 1:
It won’t all fit!
Apple has rules…
• Apps shouldn’t depend on other apps
• Solution: Optional Dependency
• Apps shouldn’t communicate with
other apps
• Solution:
• iOS 7: Pasteboard
• iOS 8: App Groups
• Apps shouldn’t mimic the home screen
• Solution: Make it look different

40. Problem 2: Big Teams Make Big Problems
Inter-team communication
is perilous
Multi-app
deployment is a pain
Collisions waste
time
• Daily communication
• Clear APIs
• Build One Yourself
• Nightly Builds
• Solid Deploy Tool
• Build Excellent Tools
• Organize Around
Content, Not Function

41. Problem 3: On Mobile, Time is your Enemy
• 36 Months of Development… so far!
• A major update from Unity or Apple will
happen about every 8 months
• iOS 8 is really different from iOS 7
• We started on Unity 3.5 – now on 4.6!
• Example: Occlusion culling was very
different from Umbra 2 to Umbra 3
• Plan to be disrupted

42. Is Mobile AAA
possible?

43. Thanks!
@jesseschell
jesse@schellgames.com
Slides at jesseschell.com