In the Winter of 2019 I had the privilege of spending 12 weeks designing for the EA FUEL Team. A division of EA Sports dedicated to creating high-quality mobile sports games connected to franchises such as FIFA, NFL and the UFC.
Having previously released UFC Mobile 1 in the spring of 2015, it’ll be nearly 6 years since UFC fans have received a new F2P mobile game.
As an assistant mobile design intern, I led the design for the fighter ability ranking system and was able to iterate on equipment store designs.
Due to the game still being in beta, most of the work I did is still under NDA. Pictures used in this summary are from the public beta tests. If you’d like to chat and learn more about my experience please reach out!
Sample UFC fight from Android beta testing
I’ve played tons of fighter mobile games before and looked into ability attributes before but have limited experience with designing frame data. So I reached out to the UFC console quality verification team for help. Talking about where exactly to start and how they accomplished the ability tuning in UFC console 2 and 3.
Half way through my design process we received a UX research game test report on issues corresponding to the current beta game play. Having this user feedback was key in directing how corestrikes and ability values were to be balanced.
As a long time hockey fan and gamer, it was truly a blast being able to walk across the office and see the game you used to play as a kid being developed. Having random conversations with different teams, learning about their design process broadened my understanding of how games were designed and the extensive amount of work that goes on behind closed doors.
To top it all off, my experience at EA is an internship I'll never forget. I want to thank everyone on the UFC FUEL Team for welcoming me with open arms and helping me along the way when I struggled.
Special thanks to my manager Jason and the producer team for teaching me so much during my internship. Thanks to the team I was even able to experience my first UFC Fight Night 158!
I also want to thank my recruiter Brenna for organizing so many awesome intern events and providing support, knowledge and guidance when needed. Because of you and all the interns it really made me miss Toronto a little less and enjoy my time in Vancouver!