Howdy, I'm João, founder of Emergent Interactive

[João Morais]

Hello everyone,

My name is João, I'm originally from Portugal, currently living in the Netherlands.

I've been a software engineer for over a decade, a business owner for a few years, and I'm now currently a Product Owner for a multi-national Dutch retailer.

I've started coding 17 years ago because I wanted to build something like oGame. After many failed attempts throughout the years, I finally managed to start building Cosmo Crafter in 2023. Little did I knew of how much time it would've taken me to polish the game, to balance the economy, to make it feel engaging and rewarding, but here we are, 3 years later and it's looking better than ever. 

I started this year with one goal: to figure out where I wanted to spend my energy. I have an entrepreneur spirit, and building products that people can connect with is part of my DNA, but as a creative, sometimes is easy to drift into the next idea without closing the loop on the previous one. Before the start of the year I was pondering to focus 2026 on one thing, but I didn't knew what: I had several ideas, from products for simplifying the life of Product Owners, to solutions for events and engagement, and other. The decision was instead to focus on Games. I had, after all, Cosmo Crafter, and the foundations of a population engine for a dynastic civilization game: Phratek. So I did. I started improving Cosmo Crafter again, I started building Phratek, but there was still something missing...

As a systems thinker, as an engineer that hates to repeat himself, as a product owner that wants to learn faster and improve his products, I needed an ecosystem. That's when Emergent Interactive came to be, and I couldn't be prouder of what we've been building with Emergent Interactive. Together with a friend we've built privacy-friendly analytics to measure different game events and obtain insights, we've built telemetry to observe failures across the games, we've built new games and experiments, we have built centralized communications and accounts, cross-game rewards, and more. Since then, and across the ecosystem we have triplicated the number of players that we had 2 years ago on Cosmo Crafter, and we're able to learn faster what players want and nwant.

Can't wait to see what 2027 will bring for Emergent Interactive, for our games, for our community. 

I'm also always interested to follow what the community is building, but also to connect, and collaborate with fellow builders. If you'd like to join the ecosystem, either with your own game, or to help us build further, reach out, let's talk. You can find me on Discord or LinkedIn.

Thank you for reading.