I joined the Madden NFL ’11 XBox360 & PS3 development team late in the production cycle in order to help the team complete the game. I had previously been primarily focused on developing the Madden NFL ’11 game for the Nintendo Wii console that year.
I joined the team in order to help complete the Online Team Play feature which allowed multiple players to play in a single game online, with up to 3 players per team. The previous online head-to-head game mode only allowed a single player per team, who was able to control the entire team, so the ability to have up to 3 players per team, each controlling a specific subset of the players on the field was a radical change, and the team requested my expertise to help get this new mode working in the game.
In addition to working on the Online Team Play feature, I also led development of the GameFlow feature, which allowed novice players of the game to have a much easier simplified experience when choosing which play to call on the field. Rather than having to wade through hundreds of plays, depending on a deep understanding of NFL playbooks, this new feature allowed more casual or novice players to pick from just 3 simple suggestions, each of which are pre-selected by the games A.I.
I also led development of the ‘GamePlan’ feature which allowed more advanced or ‘hard-core’ players to benefit from the ‘GameFlow’ feature by allowing players to rate or score the different plays in their playbook for each individual game situation (eg: ’1st down’, ’2nd and short’ etc) so that the game’s A.I. would pick from their most preferred plays in each given situation, thus still giving the player the control of changing their playing style while also giving them the quicker experience of quickly picking their plays without the need to dig through their playbook to find the plays they wanted each and every game.
EA Sports – Madden NFL 11 official page
EA Sports – Madden NFL 11 media