YoWorld and Fish World both use weekly in-game themes to provide players with a new, cohesive aesthetic that they can decorate and style their character with every week. As the Visual Designer it was my responsibility to communicate that theme's aesthetic by creating marketing graphics, social media banners and templates, and most importantly a "theme kit" for the Live Ops team to use when they were preparing the in-game purchase promotions.

Depending on the aesthetics of the theme, the kits would contain a wordmark/logo, a new colour palette (based on the colour palette chosen by the art team for the release assets), and a series of themed graphics (background images) and banners or starbursts to help the live ops team draw attention to the relevant calls to action. Because of the number of these promotions being pushed to the player each day (sometimes a dozen or more in a day) it was crucial that the templates were easy and quick for the Live Ops team to apply the themes to. In addition, in order for the Live Ops team to be able to work ahead on their promos, it was necessary that the templates were built in such a way as to allow the theme to be applied after the fact, without breaking anything.

The solution was to create a series of symbols and instances that would have nomenclature that didn't change, so that when someone dragged and dropped the theme kit assets into a template file (in Adobe Animate) they could simply choose to replace all similar assets, and the theme would be automatically applied to the template. This technique not only allowed for more Visual Design control over the promo windows in-game, but saved a ton of time when it came to designing individual promos, allowing more to be produced every day.

In 2022 I was tasked with working on a visual refresh of the theme kits and templates for YoWorld's promotions. The previous series of templates had been designed early in my tenure in 2016, and the templates had been around for even longer in some cases. After speaking with stakeholders and getting some direction in terms of what areas they wanted to see improvements in, I set out to re-design the 25+ templates that the team used on a daily basis.

For the most part these changes were aesthetic, the overall structure of the sales and promotions at that time didn't change too much, so the focus was on making the promotions more performant and drawing players' attention to the best offerings in every window. With a schedule as busy as ours in terms of daily releases, it was important that the templates allowed the Live Operations team to make the decisions they needed to in order to push the best content to players. The templates followed the same technique as their predecessors, including using a reactive theme kit to update templates on a weekly basis, but with some key changes. The new templates would push more focus to the assets themselves, giving more space for the artwork to shine and allowing the Live Operations team to arrange rooms and bundles in a more attractive and exciting way. In addition, it was determined that to get the most engagement, it was important that each window had a primary call to action, as previous templates had grown a bit untamed in this regard.

Finally, the new templates and theme kits would be more subtle when it came to the themed aesthetics from week to week. The artwork and the marketing materials were very much aesthetically different, and having the look and feel of the in-game purchase windows fluctuate as much as they did was doing more harm than good when it came to brand cohesion. The result was a more visually appealing promotion window with a more clear purpose and call to action. I've included some samples of those below.

Another important component of the visual design team's job at Big Viking Games was the development of attractive and interesting pieces of branding and advertising for weekly themes. This included a series of social media banners for each theme, templates for the Social team to use when sharing news or informing players of upcoming content or events, a themed gift box for use with each theme kit, and a new unique logo/wordmark to be used with all player-facing communication for themed releases in-game. This was a particularly creative aspect of the job, and allowed us to flex our illustration skills a bit.

Each theme came with a palette from the art team, and it was up to the visual designers to look at upcoming releases, read the theme brief, look at the palette and develop what amounted to a mini brand identity using assets the art team had created and our own knowledge of what makes an attractive identity.

Below are some samples of branding for themes from YoWorld and FishWorld.