Another little aspect of my continued game is the visual side of it. If a player is going to essentially be sticking with me for a long period of time, I like to be able to recognise him. Any time a player is recreated into a new game, he is treated as an “real” player, rather than one of the game’s newgens. This means there will be no individual face, just the default player face that comes with the game or the chosen skin.
Back in the days when I started recreating my club and players, newgen faces were a lot easier on the eye – the last few instalments of the game have given us some monsters. Previously however, the faces were simpler, 2d images, which also allowed the addition of a hairpack (with or without a shirt). As well as the players themselves then, I also recreate the player face, as much as I can.
I started this out by going back to an old FM15 save, and loading a skin with large faces in the player profile, I set a plain grey background behind it, deleted the hairpack from the game and ended up with nothing but bald newgens. I then went through and grabbed images not only of all my players at the time, but also of a sample of other random players for future use. This included black and Asian player faces to make sure I could recreate those when needed.
The next stage was to cut out the faces in Photoshop, where the Magic Wand tool was sufficient (thankfully) to quickly get rid of the grey background and leave a clean enough face on a transparent background. Using this method, I compiled a bank of faces, which in time I would add hair and shirts to (from the FM15 hairpack). As I was using the hairpack in my game as well, it was an easy job to find the correct style and colour to add to my existing players, and doing it this way left a cleaner image than leaving the hair on and trying to cut the background away from it.
Of course, there’s some artistic license involved. The way new faces are generated by the game now means I’ll never be able to find a perfect match for my players, so I have to just settle for something that’s close enough. There’s also (in my opinion) a lot of stupid hair in the game, so when creating my player faces I tend to tame that where applicable.
Overall I have something like 150 bald faces in the bank, plus about 100 with hair (some of which have been previously used and “retired”). That’s not including faces for the current batch of players. Because it takes a bit of time and effort to create them, my rule is only to do so once a player breaks into the first team and starts showing up regularly. Otherwise, I could end up using hundreds of faces for young prospects who never quite make it.
When creating my players in the editor to start the new game, each is given a UID, which will be one up from the previously created player. As well as a spreadsheet for planning my game, I also have another for putting the club’s facepack together. Rather than renaming image files, I find it quicker to have the faces labelled by player, then put the names into a spreadsheet with bits of code already entered and a concatenate formula at the end ready to copy and paste into an xml file. This way I can just put in the first player’s UID and then let Excel copy the numbers down for the remaining players (thus it’s important to make sure I am creating the players in the right (alphabetical) order!)
The next part of the visual aspect is the club identity. I taught myself how to use Photoshop basically by doing kit and logo designs on a couple of the FM Fansites. One of the early things I did for my legacy game then was to refresh the club logo, which I thought was a little dated. I kept most of the design elements, but just gave it a different shape, and put in the year founded and a club nickname. I also create new kits for the club in each new iteration of the game, just to keep things fresh.
Football Manager Legacy Gaming 