If you examined the footballers’ faces in the old versions of Football Tactics, you could notice that the game consists of a very small amount of pre-baked faces which are very similar to each other. We couldn’t add more variety to the faces because they had very poor detalisation. It means that we couldn’t add more different details to the faces.
But when you purchase the footballers on the transfer market, when you give them chances to show themselves on a pitch, when you invest in their growth, you get closer to them. When a young footballer you believed in becomes a superstar after 5-6 seasons of being not useful, you will like this character a lot.
However, the old face system didn’t allow us to show footballers’ uniqueness. So your young genius might look the same as 5-6 other footballers in your team.
Also, in other teams, you often could meet the footballers which were hard to play against. It’s interesting to know the face of your enemy, to find a personality behind it. But you couldn’t. Until the next update.
We understood that every footballer has to be unique. So increasing the detalisation and new rendering were the part of the much bigger task. We started developing our own Face Engine!
The main idea is that every face consists of many small interconnected parts. Every part has its settings of width, height, depth etc. The Engine will combine the faces for every footballer from these parts. Moreover, the Engine will understand the nationality of the footballer it creates the face for. That’s why you won’t meet ridiculous combinations like a Moroccan footballer with blue eyes and yellow hair.
The Face Engine will connect to already started campaigns. So you will see how your footballers look with the new detailed faces.
The Engine was developed by only 4 developers - a programmer and 3 artists. Prototyping and preparations took around 8 months. And ~4 months is taking to implement the engine to the game. But we hope the wait was worth it.
We are a tiny independent team, we don’t have big budgets, but our ambitions and experience allowed us to created the Face Engine which not every “big” game can boast about. But we wouldn’t be able to make it if not you - our players. Thanks to your purchases of Football Tactics while it’s in Early Access, we can make the game much better than we could dream about the year ago.
The Face Engine and other new graphical improvements will be released in Autumn in the Update #9.