Article
What are emotes?
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Emotes are a standard feature in most MMOs these days yet they serve no real ‘game’ purpose. They have no real ‘function’ and are an entirely social feature of massively multiplayer games.
Essentially, emotes are used as a communication tool, a shortcut if you will. They can be used to portray a feeling, or emotion, or mood, or as a response to something someone has said or done. Rather than type ‘Don’t do that, it’s silly’, for example, users can type /silly into the chat window and an automated response appears to people around the user, or to whoever the user has targeted, sometimes with an associated animation attached to the emote.
If you’re feeling happy about someone, typing a range of emotes such as /happy, /glad, /smile or /bounce can convey this to others quickly, easily and usually with a sense of fun.
As such, their importance can be debated. In single player games, emotes are virtually non-existent. They are not needed. In standard offline games a player has a set number of moves that are important to the task at hand. In an MMO you interact with people and so need more tools for communication. Suddenly the ability to express yourself can be hugely important.
Emotes are also just there for ‘fun’. And that’s absolutely fine! Games are supposed to be fun! So when you’re not busy playing football you can socialise with friends in bars, FS Club areas or literally anywhere in the FS world and just muck about with eachother trying out the different emotes. It’s one of the first things I do when I start playing a new MMO!
For such a potentially frivolous feature, the process for getting emotes in-game is a long one.
Firstly we had to have an emote list.
You can find a list of standard emotes used by popular MMOs on the ‘net. I listed ones I could remember from other games I’d played, checked I hadn’t forgotten any important ones, then added a few original ones that I’d always wanted to see in a game. Personal influences play a big part here too. There are many film and tv references in there that not everyone will understand or identify with, but if you do ‘get’ them they’re guaranteed to make you smile!
Having got a list together of the emotes we wanted to get into the game, we spent a couple of days at a motion capture studio with both male and female actors capturing the data that would form the building blocks of the animations we were after for various emotes.
The actors wore a special suit with sensors, which look much like golf balls, attached at various points on their body. They then acted out the required movements and the data was captured from the sensors.
I had a very clear idea of what I wanted the animations to look like and would give directions to the actor, check what it looked like on a monitor, then give more detailed direction if needed to get the desired result.
Both our actors were superb, patient, and a lot of fun! A lot of the animations we found out later weren’t suitable or good enough to go into the game, but there are also a range of animations in there that were improvised by the actors on the day.
Then we get a list back of all the takes and the art department sort through it all to see which animations we can use. This is then whittled down to a manageable size and we send the list back with the anims we need and wait.
When we finally get the final animations back, we have to integrate them into the game. We use tools to insert each individual animation into our database and then tell it what animations are attributed to which emote.
All of this takes months of planning and hard work, but we hope you enjoy the emotes we’ve put into Football Superstars. Overall, they’re cool and fun, and should certainly add to the social aspects of the game!
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