Next Gen?

I participated in the transition from the PS2/Xbox generation of consoles to the PS3/Xbox 360 generation we are in right now. It was a very tough transition for us. We pretty much threw out the old Madden engine and created a new one from scratch. There were some systems that stayed, but the whole art pipeline was completely changed, which included the animation system. The game play for modern 3D games are pretty much animation driven.

It is now 5 years since Xbox 360 debuted and there is no next generation of consoles in sight. However, there has been a lot of movement in mobile gaming. I remember when the nGage came out and everyone laughed. Now it seems they were just a little ahead of its time. The amount of games that are coming to the iPhone is staggering.

Now I’ve read this rumor on Gamespot that Apple might be planning TV-based gaming through their Apple TV product. Could Apple try and force their way into the space that has been pretty much dominated by Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft? We’ll see, but it’s an intriguing thought.

Of coarse, our philosophy at EA is to build games for any platform. However, it does make it very difficult when the hardware is vastly different from one another.

Happy New Year

Hope everyone had a save New Years Eve celebration. 2010 is history and here comes 2011. We are busy working on Madden & NCAA at Tiburon. We are most of the way through Production and are about two months away from declaring Alpha on both products. We usually build up and build up and when we get back from holiday break, it’s a big sprint towards the finish line. I equate it to riding a roller-coaster. From August to December, you are clicking up the hill and then once you hit January you are sliding down all the way until ship.

January 2011 also marks my 13th anniversary in the game industry. Back in January 1998, I joined Atomic games. If you haven’t noticed, there’s a new tab / drop-down at the top of the page. This is a series of pages that talk about each game that I’ve made over the years. I’ve only completed Close Combat 3 through Section 8, but I will be putting new ones up Madden Ultimate Team and Madden NFL 11 soon. Each page contains and paragraph talking about what I worked on, the text blurb from the back of each box, screen shots, and if there was a PC demo available, there’s a link to it. For me, its always nice to go back and look over the old stuff and reminisce. If you have any question on what it was like to work on any the games I worked on, drop me a line.

Back to NCAA

It’s been a wild year and a half since I’ve returned to Electronic Arts. I started out in EA Tiburon’s Project Management Office. That lasted only a couple of months before I was moved to Madden Ultimate Team. I stuck with the same set of developers as we got the servers for Madden NFL 11 tested and ready for launch, ported Madden Ultimate Team over to Madden 11, and implemented the scouting feature in online games. Once we launched in August, I moved over to our Central Football Gameplay. This group is responsible for the Gameplay for Madden and NCAA Football. I always say they are responsible for “hike to tackle”, but in actuality there’s a little bit more around that.

Well, I’m on the move again. And the job I’m moving to is actually the job I had three years ago. I’m moving back to be the head Development Director on NCAA Football, what Tiburon calls the Program Manager (EA-Canada calls this position Franchise Development Director, which I like better).

As I mentioned in the NCAA team meeting when I was announced as coming back to the team, I’m a big fan of NCAA Football. I’ve been playing it since EA-Tiburon has been making versions of it. So, I’m very excited to be back on that team. Beyond my fandom, I’m also impressed with NCAA’s development practices and I think their long term vision for the franchise is the right direction to go. I will once again be teamed up with Seann Graddy, a Development Director who is now going to be in the “Project Lead” role, or Senior Producer. I’ve worked with Seann in the past on Madden NFL 06 and NFL Head Coach. I’ve always had great respect for Seann and I can’t wait to start my new role.

While putting together the presentation that I showed to the team, I put together a list of Football video games that I’ve played over the years. It was a little scary that I’ve been playing these games for almost 20 years now:

Front Page Sports Football 93 – 99
MS NFL Fever 2000
Madden NFL 2001
NCAA Football 2002 – 2011

Anyway, I’m excited to be back on the NCAA Football team and the team has evolved over the last three years to a great team that I’m also excited to be a part of.

Nearing the Finish Line

The past three months have been exhausting. This has probably been the most I’ve ever worked between shipping Madden Ultimate Team in January and now Madden NFL 11 in August. The last two weeks have been a lot of overtime making sure the servers are ready for the tens-of-thousands of people who are going to be playing Madden NFL 11 at the same time this up coming week.

If you haven’t tried it yet, pick up the Madden NFL 11 Demo available on PS3 and Xbox 360. Me and a team of two engineers took the existing game and paired down the features from the retail game. It’s the first time we’ve started worked on the demo before submitting the main game to Sony and Microsoft. It’s also the first time we’ve done something other than: two teams and 1 minute quarters. This will give you a flavor of what the retail game is going to be like if you can’t wait until Tuesday.

This weekend I will be heading to New Orleans for the media launch of Madden NFL 11. They are called it “Madden Gras” and it’s open to the public. So, if you are down in New Orleans on Monday. Head down to Fulton Square 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. for some music, food, and of course some Madden football. Then there will be a parade down Bourbon Street at 7:00 p.m. The event will be on USTREAM and I will be on there talking about Madden Ultimate Team.

On Tuesday, I will be flying back and heading directly to the office to help out our Launch Team to make sure our servers are still up and running on the day of release. We monitor them very closely for the first month, but the first night and first weekend are usually the busiest.

So, it’s not over yet, but I can definitely see the finish line.

Hope everyone enjoys Madden NFL 11.

First Orlando IGDA Meeting

With the development of Madden NFL 11 winding down, I felt it was time to get back to one of my promises to myself: get more active in the game development community. Right when I got back to Orlando, I e-mailed the IGDA Chapter Leader, Dustin Clingman, and found out that there was an active chapter and they met monthly. I signed up to get notifications of when the meetings were, but got caught up in shipping Madden Ultimate Team and then Madden.

Dustin was the speaker for the meeting doing a talk on “Creative Responsibility”, driving yourself and the people who you work around you to do their best and not accepting anything less. I could tell it was a personal subject for Dustin and it was geared more towards veterans of the game industry. The meetings are about 75% students and 25% game industry, which is pretty indicative of the Orlando game community. The questions at the end his talk from the students tended to be more “how can I get better?” or “how can I show people in the industry my creativity?” Unless you’ve shipped a game and worked with a group of people, you probably couldn’t get the gist of what he was talking about. I enjoyed the speech and as a driver of quality in our games, I constantly have to evaluate other people’s work. While Madden and NCAA Football are at the top of our industry, I feel we could always do better and we make compromises in quality when it’s not necessary.

I had a good time overall, meeting a few other people in the game industry and a lot of students trying to break in. I’m looking forward to next month’s meeting.

Reflections on Finaling

Finaling a video game is always tough work. A lot of late hours and a lot of pressure as the deadline looms it’s ugly head. Right now I’m wrapping up Madden NFL 11, where I’m the Development Director for our features that are server dependent. For example, Online Franchise or Madden Ultimate Team from Madden NFL 10, which are game modes which are completely dependent on our game servers. If the servers are down, you don’t play those game modes. All the features that I worked on aren’t announced yet, so I can’t go into the details on what’s new for Madden NFL 11.

This is the seventh game I’ve finaled at Electronic Arts – Tiburon (if you don’t include Madden Ultimate Team) and I do have to say that this has been the smoothest one so far. Now, I have been working until 8 p.m. – 10:30 p.m. for the past four weeks, but that’s not near as bad as some projects where I’ve greeted the sunrise on many an occasion. In fact, that’s one of my metrics for how bad a finaling went: number of sunrises seen. (Worst was Madden NFL 2006 Xbox 360. It was the launch title for the 360 and I saw at least 5 – 6 sunrises).

One of the things I like about working at Tiburon is that we are always striving to improve the processes by which we make games. Sometime is doesn’t happen as fast as people would like, but I see the effort. I can say that the way we make video games now is a lot different than it was on Madden NFL 2002 PC. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to move from programmer to manager was to be part of the improvement.

Now we are seeing the rise of companies like Zynga and EA-Playfish. Who have a new casual take on gaming which is turning traditional game development on its heels. It’s similar to how we developed Madden Ultimate Team. A small team that was brought together to bring a new gaming experience to Madden. With this new take on gaming, comes smaller compact games, which are constantly being updated and not just once a year. It’s an interesting time to be in the game industry.