Best Indie Face Editor + DEMO news

“Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.”

- Pele

At the first look, Football Tactics seems to be the game about tactics. But after some time playing it you understand that this game is about creating the team, about your strategical decisions and about the footballers.

Earlier footballers in Football Tactics were cute, but their faces were similar to each other. Each of them has his own class, his own skills, attributes, age and level. However, it was almost impossible to differ them by sight. The game contained a very small amount of pre-baked faces. As a result, the half of your team might have one and the same face.

For a long time, we want to add to the game the replays of the goals, the animations of entering on the pitch, the goal and victory celebrations. But it all makes little sense when you can not differ the footballers by sight. Each your goal is scored not by just an ingot, but the person to whom you have some attitude. It was either a young player, to whom you gave a chance, or a strong forward, whom you bought for a time until the youth is growing up or maybe it was your veteran.

The individuality matters not only for the footballers but for your club in the whole. In our old graphics engine, we were not able to show on your football kit the club’s and sponsor’s logo, and player’s number. As a result, the only difference the teams on the pitch had is a color and pattern of the kit.

Update #9 makes your playing experience more individual!

Last fall our artists started to develop the technology of Face Engine. In 8 month, at the beginning of summer, we understood that we can implement it in the game and started to work on Update #9. The development was moving hard because we are a small team. However, I believe that we managed to raise the level of the graphics to the new level.

So, what is waiting for you in this update?

1) Face Generator

Now every face in the game will be unique. The Face Generator creates the faces from around 150 settings. It also takes to account the footballer’s nationality. Therefore, for example, in Spain, your footballers will look differently than in England.

Your saved campaigns will update automatically. Every your footballer will get a new face based on his nationality.

You will see your footballers not only in the matches but in all screens where there is the information about selected footballers: MVPs, Contracts, Info etc.

2) Face Editor

If you don’t like the look of any your footballer, just click on him, go to the “Info” screen and press the button “Change”. It will open the Face Editor. There you can create a new face for your footballer. Also, the Face Editor is available from the League Editor. It means that you can create the faces for the modifications.

To make the editor more easy to use, we added few neat features to it:

• You can copy the code of every face. So if you created an interesting face, you can send the code to friends or save somewhere
• If you have the code in your clipboard, press the button “Paste” to make the face from this code
• Auto Camera automatically rotates to the appropriate angle to make you see what part of the face is changing. But you can disable it
• You can use arrow buttons to rotate the camera
• You can use 1-5 buttons to rotate the camera to the standard angles

3) New graphical engine

To make the new faces and kits look nice, we rewrote our graphical engine. Even though there aren’t many places in this update where you will see the new renderer, it serves as a base for the future improvements.

4) New details on the football kit

Now the football kit of any team will show the club’s logo, sponsor’s logo, and the footballer’s number. You can change the number on the “Info” screen.

Interestingly, that in support of our commitment to making every player unique, we made it so that not all the footballers choose the standard numbers. You can notice that some footballers choose the numbers with their birthday or just some nice number. Some teams do not allow players to choose the number 12 as it belongs to their fans. So, in such teams, you won’t see the footballers with this number.

Unfortunately, the footballers’ names won’t be shown in this update. But we will implement this feature in the next update.

5) Goalkeeper kit

Almost from the first day of release in Early Access players asked us to add a goalkeeper kit. We wanted to add it, but we also knew that we are going to significantly rework the overall graphics. So we postponed adding the kits to the Update #9.

In the new update, there will be two goalie’s kits. One – for the home teams and another – for the away teams.

6) Thermal Underwear

When we see the possibility to add something to the game which would add more immersion and at the same time is reasonable in development, we do it. That’s why we added thermal underwear. It appeared that adding it is not very hard.

Now at winter your footballers will be dry and warm :)

However, in the warm countries such as Spain, you will never see the thermal underwear.

7) Kick off animations

To make you see your footballers a bit more, we added the new kick off animations.

8) Improvements of the footballers

Many players said that they like the stylization of the footballers. But with our general graphics improvements, the footballers’ style couldn’t stay untouched. Therefore, we have made all the changes, trying to preserve the uniqueness of our style.

Firstly, we significantly increased the level of the details. The old models consist of 800 polygons, but the new ones have more than 16 000 polygons. The 20 times more! For better understanding the difference, I’ll make an example. The one boot of the new footballer has 1,5 more polygons than the whole old footballer.

But then we had a problem. Trying to save the old stylization, we used the proportions of the old low polygonal footballers. As a result, many of you noticed that the new footballers have a bit short hands. The old footballers were so simplified that the short hands were the part of the stylization. However, it didn’t work for the new detailed models.

By the way, all images in this article, except kick-off animation, show the footballers with short hands. But in the Update #9, the hands are fixed.

Remaking the hands carried a lot of other reworks. We had to change all textures and the most important – all game animations. It was really a huge amount of work. But we did it. Because one such detail could spoil the impression of the whole new graphics.

DEMO version

You can see all these pretty features yourself! Just download demo-version, and start a new campaign. Not only you will see the new graphics. We give full access to our Face Editor. So you can play with it, create faces, experiment. Have fun!