AIFA
AIFA was the football game from Altered State Machine (ASM): collectible characters with an AI “brain”, playing on floating arenas. In 2022 I made almost all of its art myself and art-directed its characters and maps: six new primes and 51 pop-culture variants, 38 rares, the lootboxes they come in, 45 arenas and a world for the lore. AIFA later grew into FIFA AI League.
- CLIENT
- Altered State Machine
- YEAR
- 2022
- ROLE
- Art Direction, Character Design, 3D Art
- DELIVERABLES
- Characters and variants, Lootboxes, Arenas, World map
- TOOLS
- Blender, World Machine
- CREDITS
- Nguyen Nhut, character design, 13 of the 19 primes
Ecosystem artwork
The world of Alleriya, seen from the ground.
Futureverse had bought Altered State Machine, and every Futureverse ecosystem needed an artwork to represent it. Mine had to sum up the work I had done on AIFA so far, with the "F" logo in the centre.
I built it as floating islands, a callback to the diorama-style arenas and a way to show how varied the world is.
Blockout, detail pass, final artwork.
All-Stars
Six primes, 51 variants, a lot of models.
The brief: expand the AIFA primes, and make a wide range of alternate versions of them that reference popular culture. I designed each one and modelled them myself.
That meant six primes and 51 variants. Nguyen Nhut designed the other 13 primes; every version built on them is mine.
01 The 19 primes: 13 designed by Nguyen Nhut, six by me: Love Ghost, Octopus, Quadrobot, Zen Master, Occultist and Winter Queen.
02 The bosses: themed, ready-made characters, grouped under their primes in the same order. 42 of them got an arena of their own (see Arenas); the full roster has a few more.
03 Extra toppers: ears, hats and hair that every original can wear, not tied to a prime.
Rares
A cyborg and a zombie of every prime, and a family of heroines.
On top of the pop-culture variants there were 38 rare versions: a cyborg (ASMilated) and a zombie for each of the 19 primes.
04 ASMilated, the rare cyborg versions, in the order of the primes.
05 The zombie versions, in the same order.
06 The 11 heroines, a family of their own: configurable, with no one-to-one link to the original primes.
07 Chromatics: special colours, only for All-Stars with the Chromatic trait. The last two are the chromatic Player One and Player Two, ASMilated.
08 CTAC, the Player One and Player Two bosses.
Lootboxes
A box that sides with the brains.
The characters and their brains (the AI cores) come inside mystery boxes, so I designed the boxes too.
The brains ASM had designed leaned into a high-tech, detailed style taken from the ASM brand, far from the bright characters. I used that split and gave the box a modern look, closer to the brains than to the characters.
Each box holds four characters and a single brain, hence the four compartments and the one glowing sphere.
From tier to tier only the plate changes: a logo in place of the number.
Arenas
45 arenas, each one a floating diorama.
Next I was put in charge of the arenas: one for each of the 42 "boss" variants, two more for the ASMilated collections and one for the heroine collection.
The brief asked for floating dioramas, so I designed each one as a football pitch, where the game is played, with its own scenery around it.
13 42 of the 45 arenas.
The world
A world for the new lore, revealed one stage at a time.
The arenas were separate collectibles, but the new lore needed a world of its own. It would be revealed in phases, from a high-tech LIDAR scan in ASM's style to more and more detail. Players had to mine each section to uncover it, so it had to be big enough to last.
Then the brief moved to a realistic topography, to work with the new GEN-II brains that players would mine the map for.
01 Cartoon prototype
The first version, cartoonish like the arenas.
02 Realistic relief
Then a realistic topography, so it would work with the new GEN-II brains.
03 GEN-II brains, by ASM
Each region would yield brains of its own colour, hence the distinct palettes.
04 Stage 2, without details
Erosion and river flow simulated in World Machine, inside the original layout.
