I turned my virtual airline network into a GIS project

Check out the map and more details on the project page.

Airlines Manager: Tycoon is a game developed by Playrion in which players can create and expand their airline network by establishing hubs, purchasing destinations/routes, acquiring aircrafts, scheduling flights, and so on. In this game, I created airline company, PacWorld, with 12 hubs, over 400 destinations, and more than 1500 routes in its global network, ranked among the game’s top 2% players.

I wanted to show it off to my friends, but since the game’s default route and destination maps are not visually satisfactory to my personal standards and are only available to registered players, I decided to create my own interactive map to show all of my destinations and routes.

Thanks to the great many resources on ArcGIS Hub, I was able to get a spreadsheet of essential information and data for all the airports in operation in the world (no exaggeration here). After manually entering all the routes and airports I have in the game, I was able to match them with the world airport dataset to fill it with their geographic information, as well as other necessary information.

Inspired by flightconnections.com, I wanted my airline network map to be interactive and responsive, in which viewers can explore and look up any airport or route in any way they want. I experiemented many different approaches to visualization on different platforms, including Great Circle Mapper and Mapbox Studio, before finally turning to ArcGIS. The final product realized most of my intentions for the project, while there are still a few features I failed to implement due to technical restrictions.