Under The Hood: Christmas Winterland WoTr Event

In December, we launched the Christmas Winterland event for Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator. This ended up being one of our biggest and most successful World of Trucks events in which truckers completed over 2,600,000 deliveries. Recently, we spoke with some of the developers responsible for creating the event to bring you another "Under the Hood" blog.

As this project involved dozens of people, we couldn't interview everyone, so we selected a few of them from various departments to bring you an insight into their work on the magical Christmas Winterland! Let's take a look at how we put this exciting event together.

"It was the largest World of Trucks event we've ever produced, incomparable with anything previously attempted. We wanted something more engaging and visually stimulating than previous Christmas events, but the final result was much larger than what we initially discussed," says Gavin, our game designer.

The discussions about the Christmas event first took place in November 2022, so more than a year before its release. "The initial idea we had for this project was to create a wintery and magical depot, impressive in looks, with an environment attractive enough that you would be willing to come back to it for the duration of the event, with three portal entrances offering different routes to reach the depot," Gavin shares with us.

An event this big required everyone to chip in to make it on time so we could deliver the Winterland to our community in perfect shape. "A lot of people were involved! There were sixty people in the event channel. On the whole, the event called upon many disciplines; gameplay and event design, production, map design, asset design and research, vehicles, technical art, programming, audio design, 2D graphic design, and quality assurance. It was the incredible effort made by all the teams that made this event possible," Gavin tells us.

Lucie, our producer, managed the Christmas Winterland map and asset production, which required facilitating communication and assisting all teams in identifying and resolving issues. Her previous map designer experience was of great help in this process.

"It was my first project and it wasn't exactly a small one. Challenges were found almost every other day, from unfixed bugs to lost assets, and map hacks. All year I acted as a sort of organizational glue connecting people pushing the production forward and doing everything I could to make sure we got it done in the end and surprised our community. I'm so happy that we did it together and it was a great honor to work with everyone," Lucie reflected on her work on this project.

The magical snowy Christmas Winterland map was created by our map designer Milan who walks us through the process: "The map was done in several steps and it was a bit different from a normal production. We had to find an angle that had the reality of trucking while evoking the festive and slightly fairy-tale feeling of Winterland. We ultimately chose a world resembling old Christmas postcards. We also tackled the size and content of the map, the result was determined by the time limit we had. Also due to this, the map creation was done through the heavy use of placeholders and alternate solutions, which pushed the final testing phase a bit and led to some hectic work at the end of the project. But otherwise, it was enjoyable, thanks to the enthusiasm of everyone involved."

"Probably the most complicated part of the whole project was the fact that