ANIMAL CROSSING WEB MAP
In March 2020, Nintendo released the latest installment in the Animal Crossing video game series, Animal Crossing: New Horizons!
I was a big fan of this series when I was playing it on my Nintendo DS 15 years ago and was very excited to get the game! I had been working on publishing some interactive fantasy maps
and told myself that I couldn't get this game until they were done.
Once I released the maps and rewarded myself with the game, I thought it would be cool to create an interactive map for my island in the game! I had been playing around with some 3D extrusions in Mapbox
which would be perfect for representing the tiered topography in Animal Crossing!
First, I grabbed a screenshot from the game and brought it into QGIS to give it some coordinates. That way, when I digitize the boundaries,
Mapbox can actually place them somewhere on the Earth's surface so it can render it. Once I had all the features digitized, I could upload it as a vector tileset
to create a web map! I traced the landmass, waterbodies, infrastructure, and other geographical features and it was ready to go. One of the things I had to keep in mind that with the default Mapbox styling, I wouldn't be able to get the
iconic appearance of the tiered topography with a tan cliff and a green, grassy surface. This is because
One of the things I had to keep in mind was that with the default Mapbox styling, I wouldn't be able to get the
iconic appearance of the tiered topography with a tan cliff and a green, grassy surface. This is because extruded features in Mapbox only allow for a single color for the entirety of the polygon. My workaround was to create a very small buffer
on all of the plateaus so that I could style that to look like a shear cliff face. I also added a seamless SVG texture to the grass to replicate the iconic pattern from the actual game.
This was a super fun project to work on, both topically and because I learned a bit more about dealing with three-dimensional visualization in Mapbox.
I hope to add more to it in the future, maybe including fruit tree locations and 3D buildings. You can interact with the map here!