Maps hold a dear place in my heart. From the sketchy scrawls that envision space and place to full-color continents, in all their mesmerizing detail.

World Design: The Heartlands

This project’s aim was to create a rich overworld for a passion project called Legends of Equestria, a 3D massive multiplayer online game. I led the design of the Heartlands through all stages, acting as the project manager from early conceptualization to final 3D map-building in Unity.

This project involved an incredible range of collaboration across specialties. There are many areas I won’t get to cover like our Writing team creating the lore, characters, and personality to fill this world, our 3D artists building structure and space, and all the amazing concept art that fueled everyone's inspiration. But here’s a small slice of that story in top-down form.

We needed a connecting zone

To connect our big cities and other locations, we needed a middle zone. Based on rough approximations of city location and climate, I diagrammed the world to get us started. Because of scale, I broke this continent into 3 areas to focus on. The Heartlands is the lowest zone with the “X”.

For the first cut, I assigned the project to Kaji Ulma, one of our designers. This was one of his early passes, which considered difficulty, terrain, and climate.

I divided the Heartlands into 7 zones to break up this large project into smaller pieces.

Here’s a few examples of zone sketchwork. As the design lead for a passion project like this, I focused on enabling each person to improve and meaningfully contribute, no matter how skilled they were. Breaking up zone conceptual work among designers significantly sped up word-building and enabled a more diverse pool of ideas for points of interest.

In tandem to these sketches, designers collaborated with writers and concept artists to ensure points of interest went beyond fascinating eye-candy. I ensured all designers held a from-inception teamwork mentality, allowing lore and story arcs to inform map-making and design.

With all the zones sketched out, I created a final master reference map.

This map brought everything together, and critically incorporated topographic estimations. These estimations enabled Unity terrain modelers to get a sense of height across the Heartlands.

Finally, all of the character, structural, modular, terrain, texture, particle, and other assets were combined to create a 3D world!