NFL HeadCoach ’09 for XBox 360 and PS3 was my first video game for EA Sports.
The NFL HeadCoach franchise was designed to be a more hard-core strategy and simulation game than the Madden NFL franchise, appealing more to the sports simulation fans than the more casual sports gamers who like to control the action on the field, and play games against friends.
I joined the team part way through the production cycle, but jumped straight into the deep end.
I first worked on the advanced play calling AI for the game, which tracked every play made by every team in every situation, and evaluated the success of each play in that situation against the current opponent when deciding which play to call in the current situation. This system meant that if a particular play was particularly successful in the current situation, against the current opponent, that the CPU team would favor that play over other less-successful plays, and that the CPU would get better at calling plays over time as it learnt it’s opponents. This system also allowed the designers on the team to pre-seed that learnt knowledge with historical information so that each team would, at least initially, behave like their real-life counterpart in a given situation and then develop from their as they learnt the play call tendencies of both other CPU teams and the user-controlled team.
My second major contribution to NFL HeadCoach ’09 was the ‘Play Creator’ which allowed the player to create new on-the-field plays for their team, either before or during the game, by changing the formation of the players on the field and assigning new routes to each of the players. People could then save these custom plays to their teams playbook, and share their created plays with other users online. This feature allowed for unparallelled creativity in a sports game, and allowed users of the game to replicate new plays introduced by their favorite team during the season.
NFL HeadCoach ’09 received favorable reviews from it’s target audience but, as with many such simulation games, it received less favorable reviews from those more interested in the fast-paced gameplay of the Madden NFL franchise.