Aion Community and Marketing Site
November 2007
I designed and built this site for the game Aion: The Tower of Eternity to replace the European Marketing Teaser Site I’d made in February 2007.
My art direction for the site follows the design of the game itself, but is not a duplicate of the game user interface. I used as my inspiration the dual-faction nature of the game world, with the backgrounds split down the middle to represent two balanced factions in opposition. The game is still in development, so the only artworks available were some 3D renders, concept art and some screenshots and movies from the beta editions. I created all the other graphic and UI assets for the site, almost all of them as vector illustrations with layer effects in Photoshop so that I could reuse and scale them without loss of quality. I produced the main background image for the site from concept artwork from the game developer. The work produced a very high resolution image with the designs for the opposing factions in separate layer groups for added flexibility. This image became the central brand artwork for the site and for all other pre-launch marketing activity, such as the Leipzig Games Convention 2008 Stand, Press Pack and Give-Away Bag Design.
I created all HTML and CSS templates for the site, using the Expression Engine content management system, and all Flash designs were produced under my creative direction. The site is available in three languages using one set of templates and is exceptionally easy to maintain; all maintenance and day-to-day running of the site can be done by the content writers, marketing product managers and community managers without the need for input or support from technical staff. The site has inputs from Flickr and Twitter, is fully integrated into Google Analytics, and provides a full set of RSS feeds for syndication on fansites.
The game is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) that allows the player to choose from two factions and create a character to represent them in the game world. While the business model for Aion has not been announced, MMORPG games are often subscription based so websites for them have a dual role in appealing to both new players and existing players. Existing players tend to form a strong community with a sense of shared ownership in the game and the game world; they are not just customers, so marketing efforts have to be geared towards supporting and encouraging two-way conversation between the game developers/publishers and the community of players. The website becomes the central part of that activity.
