Face Breaker

Concept Blog - Greg Juby, Art Director

I'm Greg Juby, the Art Director for FaceBreaker, and today I'm going to tell you a little bit about the design of the characters in the game, the conceptual process we went through, and hopefully answer the question, "What the hell were they thinking?" It feels good to be finally talking about this thing after having lived it for almost two years. It's amazing to see it all coming together and have our crazy ideas come to life. I still can't believe EA let us make this game the way we did. When Trey Smith, the Creative Director, and I were sitting at the drawing board working out what "Fight Night Big" (that was the working title back then. I'm glad it changed) would look like, who the characters would be, and where and why they were fighting, we regularly said to each other, "There's no way they're going to let us do this." But to their credit (or insanity) they did.

The process of inventing the FaceBreaker characters was organic. We didn't have a set process where we wrote up a description, then took from concept art to a final model. Each character came from a different place, some started with a random thought, some as a sketch, and some were really born in 3D. The very first thing we did, however, was to agree on a few things:

First was that we would not base the characters on ethnic stereotypes. Sure, ethnicity can play a part, like it does in life, but the line was somewhere this side of "Vodka Drunkenski" from Punch Out! I'm sure a lot of people will stop reading here to go fill up the forums with comments about Romeo. Just remember, you haven't played the game yet, and your criticism will carry way more weight after you have. So just type it now and send it in later.

Where was I? Oh yeah... second, they should all be cool and visually appealing. I know, "Tell us more, Captain Obvious!" Ok, I will. We play a lot of games, and we found that there are quite a few characters out there that are just hideous. Sometimes it's the personality, the outfit, the dialogue, or they're just plain ugly. When I invest in a game character, I want someone who makes me feel cooler, funnier, tougher, or prettier than I am (...which sets the bar pretty low for me.) So we came up with the Action Figure Litmus Test?. We constantly asked ourselves, "Would this character make a cool action figure?" And we kept at it until the answer was "Yes!" ...and just to be thorough, we spent a lot of time playing with action figures.

Third, female boxers should be more than just eye candy. We have to believe that they're tough enough and skilled enough to fight in the FaceBreaker world, so they have to look and act like they can handle it. They should also (or mainly) be cool from the female gamer perspective. We just didn't want girls to pick up this game and be faced with trying to decide which bouncy-breasted thong-wearing bimbo to play as. It's just not very empowering. We were surprised to find ourselves on occasion defending the choice to put female boxers in the game. Why should we? Well, because women really do exist, women box, and they play games. These might just be the first two female "athletes" the art team at EA Sports has ever made. I didn't do any fact-checking there, so feel free.

Of course, you haven't seen the Ring Girl yet. After that last bit, you might be inclined to call me a hypocrite when you see her. Try to keep this in mind when you do: The ring girl's physical appearance doesn't exploit women, it exploits men. She's not a playable character anyway. And she's hot.

So those were the general themes, but how did we go about it? You're still reading, so I'll assume you want to know. I'll have to go back a bit to the very beginning, when it was just me.

I grabbed my pencil and got started trying to solve the design problem as put to me by the man in charge: "Make some characters." Sounded easy enough! At this point, the search was getting started for just the right concept artist, so for the time being I was on my own. Right away I threw down about a hundred ideas in thumbnail sketches: There was the magician who had a rabbit under his hat that would jump out and beat on you, the gamer kid who knew all the cheat codes and would use them against you, the prisoner, the insomniac, and my favorite, Granny, who had an apron and oven mitts instead of boxing gloves. It was all absolutely brilliant. When I presented all the big ideas, the response was, "You know this is a boxing game, right?"

I had to admit they had a point. So I decided to hold off on the gimmicks (for now) and explore different physiques, and try to tell the character's story with the body. We came up with three awesome characters to start with: Small Guy, Medium Guy, and Big Guy. Feeling like I was on a roll, I added Skinny Tall Guy and Big Guy 2. Big Guy 2 was pretty cool. At the next presentation, I was horrified to discover that everyone felt I was on the right track.

That was about the time Trey Smith joined the team. He was into everything we had done so far, and was on board with pushing the characters as far out there as possible. We decided to keep that to ourselves. Right away, my Boxer Guy sketches started sprouting identities and personalities. Small Guy, which I had drawn as wiry and fluid with dreadlocks became Kekoa, an aggro surfer. Medium Guy, who started life as a cross between Rocky and Superman got spiced up into Romeo, the latin lover. Usually, once we had the germ of an idea, we would just riff on it and the character would get bigger and better. Before long, they had their own voices. I remember Romeo's first words: "I am not punching you. I am making love to you. With my fist ."

Other characters that came out of that first group were Molotov, formerly Big Guy #1, the Russian demolitions expert. He had these giant ripped muscles and looked like he was about to explode. Big Guy #2 was an experiment into an extreme physique that looked like the Frankenstein monster. He became Brick, a giant with the mind of a child. He has a choo choo train tattoo that he drew himself with crayon and gave to the tattoo artist. Tall/Skinny Guy became Spin, the Brit DJ.

Some characters just seemed to come out of thin air. Trey was up late watching TV one night and came across a show about Shari Lewis and her puppet Lambchop. He came in the next day and said, "What if we had a character who had sock puppets instead of boxing gloves?" Now that's what I'm talking about. Oops. A bunch of hard-core sports fans just cancelled their pre-orders.

The visuals really kicked into high gear when we teamed up with Christian Bravery, a kick-ass concept artist in the UK . He has this great heroic style that just nailed what we were trying to do, and that's when we were able to start saying, "Yes! That would make a cool action figure."

We went through so many more characters than could actually make it into the game, which was our goal from the start. We wanted to make sure only the best made the cut. There were a lot of hard choices though. Luckily, right at the point when Trey and I were at odds about which characters to cut, he went on vacation, and I got to slide a couple of my favorites back in. That's why I never take vacations. I guess if enough people pick up this game, we might be able to talk EA into making a sequel and some of those cool characters could resurface. I know what you're thinking, EA doesn't normally like to do sequels, but this game will be so hot they'll just have to!