Icy Campaign
Creating a scalable quarterly branding for the icy conversion of Trackmania's seasonal campaigns
In 2023, having provided in-game graphic assets for previous Trackmania ice related events organized by Evo eSports e.V., I was invited by XLRB to create a logo for their Icy Fall Campaign, a group of driving-on-ice enthusiasts’ attempt at converting Trackmania seasonal campaign to ice surfaces. I then offered to create more assets and the project grew to involve full branding for each future campaign.
Campaign conversions exist in many kinds, and are popular with the Trackmania community because they provide new challenges and an opportunity to revisit official tracks under new perspectives.
New official Trackmania campaigns release quarterly, and the ice conversion involves the following process:
- changing each racing track’s blocks to the corresponding surface
- setting new driving records for future players to beat
- this is where I get involved: creating the seasonally themed in-game assets including graphics showing the time to beat
- sending those back for in-game implementation through the map editor
All of it is tracked through a Kanban board that we update whenever progress is made, on top of the back and forth of information-sharing that I need to create the assets.
What started as a small group DM initiative by XLRB, Henkisme, Capman, Toble, and NineToFiveGamer, quickly grew to a full fledged discord community. The team grew, and with it the dedicated playerbase for such a niche surface in an already niche game.
Since then, BedsideDraw, BurntBagels, Deekes, WonarioStrike, and Wouter joined keep the campaign ongoing as older staff members needed to shift their focus elsewhere.
Every season, I try to create “signature” aesthetics to make every campaign recognizable. The assets include:
- specific blocks signs for start, finish, checkpoints, etc.
- time-to-beat specific signs
- branded signs to advertise the campaign and its season
- in-game club assets, which is an online space / community that players can join, where the campaign is uploaded
- social media graphics to announce seasonal discovery events
Winter 2026 marked the 20th anniversary of the Trackmania Nations Esports World Cup. To celebrate, Nadeo themed the campaign’s final five maps (traditionally the most challenging) after different countries for competitive play.
They also introduced Vistas: new environments allowing players to experience environments inspired by previous Trackmania games. We had been informed that these would make the conversion a lot harder because of restrictions on blocks usage in the map editor. This made our progress a lot more difficult and stalled our release schedule.
As of September 2026, we’ve only managed to convert the Winter 2026 campaign, I did keep on creating new branding assets for hypothetical future campaigns up to Icy Fall 2026, but the project kind of has been in limbo as the teams is still trying to figure out a proper workflow to convert the rest of the campaigns.
Thankfully we worked on creating a special campaign for the aforementioned country-based tracks. I created a unique branding for Icy Esports, and specific flag themed time-to-beat in-game assets.