My goal was to create an overworld map, so I created storyboards to help our motion designer visualize the concept. I wanted to represent the different partners by their respective real-world city landmarks. I initially designed a globe that the viewers could fly around visiting city to city. At the beginning of the project, we had about 20 collaborators. As this number grew, it became impractical to illustrate every landmark. The difficulty was compounded by the short lead time we were given to prepare everything. So how could I find a way to fairly represent our 60+ partners in a fun and engaging way?

As the list of partners grew, the map began to populate itself. Having fictional landforms meant that I could add islands and essentially terraform to my heart's content. I used procreate to plan out and section off plots of land to make sure the biomes had clear borders.

Biomes were used as the basis for the overworld map. By using biomes, it was easier to incorporate video game elements as neatly and contained as possible. Where I placed developers depended on where their best known franchise would fit. For instance, Microsoft/Mojang would be in the meadow, while Blizzard would be in the tundra.

Greetings from summer of gaming

To further explore the theme of travel and adventure, I collaborated with Julia Rago, one of our editorial artists, to create postcards for the S.O.G. partners. We took inspiration from those vintage "Greetings from XYZ" postcards. After "visiting" the destinations, we would stamp the card and move on to the next location.