Graphical universe and
dynamic match visualization engine

Project description:

Trophy Manager is one of the world's leading online manager games with more than registered 240.000 players.

We helped Trophy Manager design a graphical universe of the city space in which part of the game is played. The players can now choose among several landscapes – or settings – in which their new manager career will start. Once a setting is chosen the player can use the in-game currency to cultivate the area with a range of buildings and facilities. Each building including the stadium has ten levels and adding a level means enhancing the visuals of the building of which we made 260 rich representations.

We designed, developed and implement a dynamic match visualization engine (DMVE) that enables Trophy Manager to visualize the matches that beforehand was shown as a series of text events. Now an event such as 'D. Rooney takes the free kick player and scores. What a goal!' is not only shown in writing but is actually shown as a brief video sequence.

The DMVE consists of 150 videos that can be structured into consistent sequences. In order to get the most realistic output and still keeping the project within budget we wrote an application for Kinect that enabled us to use the console for motion capturing. Practically the Kinect translated our movements and fed them directly into our Maya and 3D Studio Max setup. We implemented 12 dynamic layers in the videos i.e. the players skin colour, uniform, hair style, nose, player name and so on. Most of the dynamic layers were given ten different styles such as ten nose shapes or hairstyles, while layers such as the uniform and skin colour supported significantly more outputs. Using the layer structure logic allowed us to make the video sequences reflect the actual appearance of the player's team.