Welcome to the portfolio of NYC based Senior Interactive Developer Jens Fischer.
Please feel free to contact me for all inquiries.
EA Sports MMA
Launch Site
Fi created the online presence of EA Sports' fighting game MMA. The centerpiece of the site is the 'Live Broadcast' module that allows fans of the game to watch live matches and helps create a true online community.
Agency: Fi
Year: 2010
Role: Frontend Development
Team: Myself + 1 Backend Dev
Live Broadcasts
One of the strongest selling points of EA Sports MMA is, that players can participate in regularly hosted live events, that the community will follow
through a video stream on the website. The events will be commentated by actual commentators, often guest stars from the actual MMA scene.
I created the video player that plays back those events. The stream originates on the console that hosts the event. From there it goes through the 'Ooyala' service that
the site's video player uses as a source to play back the event.
Widgets
The site was built on a customized version of the 'Symfony' framework, which allowed us to easily create many interactive widgets to enhance the user experience. A good example is the 'countdown' widget, that is displayed on top of the main navigation. It will count down to the next live event, in order to draw the user's attention to this important feature of the site.
Content Browsing
Next to the live events, the site is used as a big content delivery portal for the EA Sports MMA community. Players can upload ingame video footage to the site, hype themselves
through videos in order to be picked for live events, share their custom fighters with the community and analyze statistics of the game.
To easily browse this huge amount of content, we created
a wide variety of interactive elements that help the user filter information and navigate through the site.
Statistics
Detailled statistics are accessed by the site through APIs that were provided by the game development team. Information like championship progress, fight history, wins and losses, as well as for example the player's belt ranking are always up to date on the site.
Content Management
The site's content is updated through three main channels: console driven content that is updated automatically (i.e. statistics) , player driven content that players can choose to share (i.e. uploaded video footage) and last but not least: official, EA Sports driven content. In order for the MMA team to easily update the site with official content, an integrated wordpress blog allows the MMA team to promote fights and features, a Twitter widget displays the latest official tweets and through a CMS the three 'game info' sections of the site can be updated with fighter images, related media, etc.