Work Placement [Week 1] - Graphic Design for EA FIFA Game

FIFA franchise game, developed by Electronic Art (EA) sis the most famous football video-game in the market. EA offers some jobs as part-time / freelance for developing the FIFA game. One of these freelance jobs are graphic design jobs for preparing the images and graphics for in-game contents.

This job is usually offered on their microsite called EA Talent Scout. By applying the job you will need to pass a test and get qualified for the job which is done online. The test will assign you some graphic design and image editing tasks.

After applying and passing the test I got qualified for the job and received the contract to sign. Then the first batch of the job was arrived for graphic editing.

The first batch contains 60 pictures of football players. I need to crop out images, edit the photo quality, prepare them for in-game 3d object faces and card items. below is the outcome example:

Challenges

Photo editing and graphic design preparation for a game like FIFA is quite challenging. There are some standrad you need to follow, things from pxel perfection and improvements. The source image is not always in high quality due to the issues during the shooting, but the outcome need to be perfect and in high-quality. This requires you to work almost on every pixel and be very familiar with Adobe Photoshop software to know how to improve pictures quality and colurs.

Another challenging part is the cropping. Pictures need to be cropped up and their backgrounds need to be removed perfectly. The cropping part becomes more challenging when a player's hair is to messi. For such a case, you will need to edit the mask precisely by zooming in in Photoshop and do each pixel and editing manually.

Contunieing the image editing and improvement work for FIFA video-game, I have finished the first batch of assignment (60 images) and submitted to my manager. After the review, I received feedback and reviews for my submission and need to modify 5 images and resubmit them - due to the data confiedentiality I'm not able to share the feedback.

After modification and resubmission, I have received another batch of editing - 32 images. These images need to be edited and submitted within 2 days.

These images are better in quality this time which means the work process would be faster since less time needs to be spent for preparation. For this batch, the images need to be tested on in-game cards as well. The cards are available in the Ultimate Team mode, a game mode in FIFA which allows you to create your own club and hire your favorite players for your club.

Here is an example of placing images on card design:

Challenges and Outcome

Placing images on the in-game card items will show that the edited face shots need to be optimized for card designs as well. The thing is that a player in FIFA can have a variation cards with different card design. This means that one player face image can be appeared on cards with dark or bright background. So, the image lighting and contrast settings need to be considered for different background colours which will affect the player face image as well.

To repvent this issue, you need to set different background colours when editting the image in Photoshop to preview the in-game outcome. Shadows and highlights of the image need to be retouched in Photoshop to solve this issue.

As for the week 3, I have received another batch of image editing jon from EA. This time, 72 images in good quality but no good shooting lighting which need to be retouched before cropping.

Above is an example of an image with lighting problem (exposure) from the shooting session. This can be fixed using Shadows/Highlights option and the Exposure effect in Adobe Photoshop.

Another round of the testing is to test the image on a player object in the game. This is mainly done by the developers. They do the image placement on the player 3d-objects in the game engine. The image needs to be mapped (UV Mapping) and then placed to a 3d object.

Testing face shots on in-game objects helped me to see how my edits will appear in the real footage of the game. After testing I realized that brightness, contrasts, hue and levels of photos are very important for editing. The game engine is quite smart in terms of rendering and lighting, but the original image is still important.

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Final Outcome

By experiencing this job I have learnt a lot, here are some of the new things I gained from this work:

• Gained new skills in grahpic design and editing (photoshop skills) such as pixel editing, tuning the adjustments and filters, improving images quality, preparing images as for in-game contents
• Learnt how to work in a team virtually
• Learnt how to manage my works independently and prepare it for other people

Additionally, this job helped me to sign a long term part-time contact for their next image editing project as a positive outcome.