Category: Electronic Arts

Madden NFL Mobile Release 8

MaddenMobile_R8Release 8.0 of Madden Mobile is now live. This client update continued to add to the “prestige levels” by awarding special uniforms that can only be unlocked once you hit those levels. League Quests were also added. You can not band together with members of your league to hit new achievement milestones and get rewards. This version also added a new way to play. You can now control the blocking back in some plays. This is unlocked in Season Mode and in special Live Events. For more information about the other releases of Madden Mobile, see my game page. It’s never too late to pick it up in the iOS App Store, the Google Play store, and Amazon App Store.

Madden Mobile Wins Sharkie

IMG_20141213_215447Here at EA Tiburon, we have an annual holiday party which also includes an awards show, called the Sharkies. The winners are voted on by everyone in the studio. Last night, to my surprise, we won for Outstanding Game Feature / Service! It’s been a great journey rebuilding this team and directing them to success. It’s been a great team effort of really passionate guys and gals who want to build an awesome mobile experience.

Going Alpha

Wow. I didn’t realize it had been a month since I wrote on here. While this Alpha has been the best one, as far as hours, I guess it still has preoccupied me. Our scheduled Alpha date was March 7 and the team did a great job pulling all their tasks together in the last sprint. The goal was to hit Alpha on time or at the very least come in better than last year, which was 7 days late.

In order to hit this goal, the idea was to leave the last sprint (3 weeks) as a “contingency” sprint. While this sounded good on paper, it was hard to know when to use the “contingency”. It seems like we used it for anything and everything and in the end, it appeared that we were scheduled right up to the end of the last sprint. The reason it got this way, was there was always “one more thing” that needed to get in or that was half done and it would be a shame to release a feature that wasn’t 100% complete. In the end we have to ship a good game with awesome features. I don’t think the concept of a “contingency” sprint works very well because you end up using it like a sprint, scheduling right up to the Alpha date. Next year I think what I’m going to do is have a two week period before Alpha which is completely unscheduled. It will only be used for finishing something that didn’t get completed in the last sprint and fixing any issues with the game which might be hindering QA’s ability to test the whole game.

Despite having that last sprint completely scheduled, the team did a great job leaving that last week of the sprint available to verify all the features were in a good state. We ended up being 4 days late for Alpha, being declared on March 11th. There were a few crashes in one of the game modes which would hold up QA from testing. EA has a checklist of things that need to be complete before a game is declared Alpha. Stability of all game modes is one of those. Even though we had done a great job on the stability of our game, there were a few timing specific bugs that held it up. Friday the last fix went in QA declared us Alpha.