FmFreaks

Hello again.

Today's blog is the first of a series of 3 about FM08's new skin, user interface and usability.

Yes, that's 3 blogs, because a lot of stuff has changed!

Sure, you've seen the screenshots (and if you haven't, you should be going to the softography section of www.sigames.com now to have a look!) and noticed a lot of changes there, although, to be fair, quite a lot has changed since then too.

But why so many changes?

Well, for a start, we thought a change would be good, particularly with the changes seen by the popularity of social networking sites, Itunes, and the new operating systems for PC and Mac. But we also undertook some indepth usability studies after the release of Football Manager 2007 and sat there watching the videos that came back, looking at splurges of colour relating to peoples eye movement whilst they were playing the game, and similar splurges of colour relating to mouse movement, and to try and reduce the latter as much as possible, alongside noticing that people tend to avoid the keyboard shortcuts that have been in the game for a while, in particular with some people who've played the game for years who didn't even know that the space bar can also be used as an alternative to the continue button. If only people read the manuals we spend ages working on, but that's probably expecting too much.

And the good thing about the usability studies is that we learnt loads. The bad thing is that we'll be doing them every year now, although that's only bad for Sega's wallet.

I'm actually not going to comment too much about the new skin, however sleek it looks. I'm also not going to go on too much in here about the in's and out's of the new player photo sizes or other skinning stuff as it's not my place to do so - maybe I should ask Ter and Jesper, who do the skins and kits side of things to do a guide for that for release in a few weeks? But they do look really good, with a new kit template for default and licensed kits, kit backs and numbering, player photo's looking so much better in game, and all being used in more places than before.

Whilst we're on the subject of player photo's though, I may as well write about our use of Facegen technology. Now, there's been a bit of confusion about this since we announced that we were using it a couple of months back.


Facegen technology is a well used tool in the games industry for creating human like faces. These faces are able to age, change shape according to height & weight, and even smile or frown depending on how the players are feeling. But it does not tie into photo's, or not in the way we are using it, anyway.

What this means is that real players (where we have licenses) will still have their photo's in the game. Where we don't have licenses the photo will not appear, as we do not have permission. But neither will a Facegen image, as that wouldn't be allowed either.

So Facegen characters will appear for new youth team players that start coming into the game at the end of the first season. They'll appear for supporter spokesmen too, and any other "fictional" character inside the game. So I hope that's now cleared up. And they look great, and add another dimension to those who love continuing to play the game after the "known" players have all long retired.

Going back to the usability study, one of the things that came as a big shock to us was how many people struggled to find the continue button in particular. So this is much bolder now, although is not the bright green anymore that you may have seen on some of the screenshots. You'll get to see it when the demo's out, but looks nice and sleek now.

Little things needed to be added, like more icons that make it more obvious to the user what they are used for. And text descriptions for what they are for for people who can't work it out, by hovering over them. Less mouse movement was also important, so some of the button placing has changed, and extra buttons added too to make some sections of the game that people might have missed in the past more obvious to people when they are playing the game. We were actually amazed by how few screens were visited inside the game, even by experienced users, and that lead to the birth of the match flow idea, although that will be dealt with in it's own blog later on.

Some things inside the game had to be made more obvious too, like having the database size displayed on the game status screen, or making squad selection rules easier to find so that you don't mistakenly try and pick those players in matches, team information is more indepth for national teams, and lots lots more.


Still with me? Good, good. Although I've got to go now or else the demo won't be ready for it's launch this Sunday, and that wouldn't make you happy, would it?

Miles