FIFA AI League
FIFA AI League was a licensed FIFA football game for the Qatar World Cup: a spin-off of AIFA, made with Futureverse in around three months of 2022. I designed and modelled what made it look new (the clothing and hats, the arenas and the ability icons) and set the look for all of them. The constraints shaped most of it: four similar bodies meant the clothes had to tell players apart, FIFA’s contract asked for new heads, and the abilities needed icons before anyone could play them.
- CLIENT
- FIFA, via Futureverse
- YEAR
- 2022
- ROLE
- Art Direction, Character Design, 3D Art
- DELIVERABLES
- Modular characters, Clothing and hats, Arenas, Ability icons
- TOOLS
- Blender, Substance Painter
Concept art
An AIFA spin-off, with a more urban look.
FIFA green-lit a game using its licence. It was going to use realistic characters, but it became a spin-off of AIFA, with a more urban look that focused on the clothes. My first exploration, inspired by Arcane, was cut for time.
This time the characters had to be modular like Lego, with no code to put them together. The bodies stayed AIFA's; I designed and modelled everything they wear.
The urban look comes from what they wear.
Clothing
Four bodies, so the clothes do the talking.
The brief gave the characters four similar bodies, to keep them modular, so the clothing had to tell them apart. It came in three tiers of rarity, inside collections with different themes.
The themes started urban. When FIFA let us go wild with them, they went eclectic. The colours came from a system that assigns palettes at random. I helped develop it and built my own version in Blender to preview them, which is what coloured these renders.
03 Eight of the themes, one outfit per rarity tier.
Hats
New heads, because the contract asked for them.
The plan was to reuse most of AIFA's hats and hairstyles, to save time. FIFA's contract required new heads, so I designed and modelled a new set.
Under the new brief the hats didn't belong to specific collections, and only some of them had tiers. I also built a character creator in Blender with Geometry Nodes, and every combination below comes out of it.
04 Extra head models: boxing helmet, space helmet, football hat and cyberpunk hair.
05 Combinations from the character creator, not preset outfits: some assets come back in other colours.
Arenas
Seven pitches, each from a real place.
Like the clothing, the arenas drew on different cultures. The game was meant to commemorate the World Cup, so they had to reference places on Earth.
The plan was a modular system, but the arenas were too different from each other for it to work in practice. The amended brief had around 40 arenas; severe time constraints cut it to around eight.
07 Six more of the arenas.
Ability icons
Icons for abilities nobody could play yet.
The in-game abilities had no icons to represent them. I had each ability's name and a few written suggestions for it, but not how it would work in the game, because that was still in progress.
So every icon starts from a name and those suggestions, nothing more.
The brief: "a fist wearing leather gloves and a spiked wristband in the style of the All-Stars, so not All-Star skin coloured."
09 More of the set, each made from a name and a written suggestion.