Tokyo Game Show 2022

Stakeholder: Discord (In-House)
Role: Illustration Lead, Layout Design

Responding to an increased interest in its app among Japanese users, Discord began increasing efforts to engage with a growing userbase in Japan. Discord attended Tokyo Game Show in 2022 and curated a suite of interactive activities, event-specific merchandise, and collectable materials for booth visitors to celebrate its inaugural appearance.

Over the 4-day event, 6000+ trading cards and 10,000+ activity zines were given out to participants! These freebies were rewarded to visitors who interacted with the booth's photo station and social media hub, encouraging engagement across platforms and driving online excitement about the event. By offering different collectable cards on each day, we encouraged visitors to revisit Discord's booth multiple times across the weekend.

Trading Cards
Our team decided to design a custom deck of trading cards as daily giveaways for booth visitors engaging with Discord's social media accounts and photo booth. The cards featured four of Discord's original characters as RPG classes. I was responsible for creating the card's character illustrations and also supported Amo with designing card layouts. Beth's character descriptions were localized into Japanese and along with katakana spellings of each character's names.

To add an interactive component to these cards, the three base cards have symbols indicating them as "Janken" cards, the Japanese equivalent of rock-paper-scissors. The fourth card serves as an easter egg, showing Discord's mascot Wumpus as a comfy gamer.

The cards were printed on holographic cardstock to create a premium appearance and printed with a standardized design on the back to unify the collection.

Activity Zine
In addition to the collectable trading cards, we wanted to create a more casual takeaway that would give visitors a fun way to connect with Discord's characters and brand voice. I served as the lead artist on this zine and created the majority of its illustrations, alongside illustration support from Kevin and Justin. The entire project team collaborated on creating activities and writing material, which was translated into Japanese by Beth with support from Discord's localization team.

The narrative of the zine would follow Discord's mascot, Wumpus, as he makes the trip to Tokyo for TGS and include activities that would be familiar with Japanese visitors. Inside the zine, readers would find a personality quiz, an amidakuji ladder game matching love letters to characters, 4koma comic strips showing characters enjoying TGS, narrative snippets, and a page helping visitors connect with Discord's Japanese social media accounts.