Hello Madden fans, welcome back for another Monday Madden NFL 10 blog from the development team. It has been a very busy couple of weeks, including the release of 3 (real) blogs in 2 weeks:
- Adaptive AI in Madden NFL 10 [link]
- A first look at Franchise mode improvements [link]
- Using layered blending, dynamic branching, and animation steering for sideline catches [link]
Since we just released a new (rather large) feature on Friday in Adaptive AI, I figured I’d use today’s blog to go over something that we as a team are all extremely happy about, which is the Madden team’s first ever “Community QA Day”.
On April 10, we flew in 8 of the most hardcore Madden fans for a marathon testing day to get an extremely early look at our Alpha build and provide feedback based on where the game is thus far. You may ask, “What is new about this? Haven’t you had community events in the past?” Yes, we have done these before, but there are some key differences.
- Previous community days usually took place around a week or two before the game was set to go ‘gold’. This meant we could show a typically much more polished game, but on the downside it meant that there was very little time to make any changes. A quick google search reminded me that last year’s 09 community event took place on May 30, 2008 (http://www.pastapadre.com/2643/live-blog-madden-09), as opposed to this year’s event on April 10 (nearly 7 full weeks earlier!). This gives us so much more time to address feedback on our new features and on existing features. As far as I know, we’ve NEVER had anyone have a hands-on this early in the process…it’s quite a refreshing change.
- This year Phil Frazier and I actually hand-picked 8 community members off of OperationSports.com based solely on the quality of their posts. None of them had ever been to the Tiburon studio before, and as far as I know, none of them had even really see an early build of Madden (or really any game for that matter). We decided to change this up because we knew the guys we picked were very critical but also typically every single post was well thought out. Many of these guys have been known around the Madden and 2k communities for years and years. Previous community days typically featured more “community leaders” – the guys that ran sites. Not to say that those guys weren’t providing feedback, because they obviously always did get us some amazing stuff, but we wanted to try something new and get the guys that we thought were extremely critical and had in depth knowledge of our former competitor’s products as well.
I think without a doubt the day overall was a huge success. We collected mountains of incredible feedback, from incorrect facemasks to a few money plays to logic issues with blocking. I kept referring to these guys as the ‘dream team of testers’, and they delivered for us big time.
The rough agenda was as follows:
10:00 – 11:00 – Introductions, expectations, “creative pitch”
11:00 – 2:00 – Franchise play (play or sim…whichever you prefer)
2:00 – 3:00 – “The Lab” (Focus: General Gameplay and AI Feedback in practice mode).
3:00 – 4:00 – Tour, Roundtable / Q & A
4:00 – Whenever you want to leave – Multiplayer or games vs. CPU
At the beginning of the day, we had each attendee give a brief intro about themselves as we went around the room, and as they talked I brought up one of their most critical posts that they’d ever made of EA. When it got around to TheWatcher, he even brought out a version of NFL 2k5 and said “if you can’t beat this, I’m going to be playing this at the end of the night” which got a nice laugh from everyone, including us. He never did play 2k5, but unfortunately our dev kits don’t play retail games anyway so I can’t say for sure whether he was converted. :)
Next I actually presented the group a trimmed-down version of our “creative pitch” – the actual presentation Phil and I give to folks like Peter Moore and other executives within EA to get our game concept approved. After giving them the basic rundown, we then let them loose on the game along with an accompanying “feature companion document” that listed nearly every major and minor feature along with an “intent” of each feature. This way they could go through the game how they pleased and provide feedback on whether they felt we were hitting the intent of our design or not. For example, this would be a page in their companion document, and below that is a shot of just a few of the sheets I received back at the end of the day:
Feature: Simulation Gameplay Overhaul
Intent: To make the game play much more realistically through the following features:
- Slower game speed
- Stretched player ratings
- Dramatically changed turn rates
- Direction change animations
- Momentum & prep steps while sprinting
- Different jukes & spins while sprinting
- Lower “tolerance” amount on tackles and blocks (much less suction)
- Much lower ‘warp’ amount on catch animations
- Normalized speed on all animations
- Forced QB dropbacks
Just some of the feedback on the feature companion sheets sitting on my laptop.
After the guys had their hands on the game for about 6 hours, we had a little break and gave a quick tour of the studio. Our final destination of the tour was our main conference room:
The big conference room on the 5th floor of the EA Sports Tiburon building
At this point we all sat down and had a roundtable on the top positives and minuses they were seeing so far. Everyone had the ability to basically list out their “game killers” – the issues that they felt were absolutely most hampering the game. I sat there with our mindmap software and took notes, so here’s a small snippet of that feedback:
You can see we have plenty of feedback to work from and some great stuff here from our hardcore fans. Often times it is very easy to get used to things after you stare at them for so long, so having this kind of in depth feedback from a fresh set of eyes (well, 8 fresh sets) is going to prove immensely helpful in us reaching our goal of the best version of Madden NFL football in history.
On a side note, just so everyone knows, the guys didn’t end up leaving until 4:00 am!
So to sum up – again I think all can agree that it was a very positive experience, and I personally believe this one day community event is one of the most important things we have ever done within the Madden franchise to create a quality product. The sheer amount of feedback on every single detail on our early build is going to be instrumental for us to keep the polish level high. We as a team have always believed that staying in constant communication with your customers is the best approach to making an iterative sports title, and this event proved that theory out on all levels. Many thanks to our attendees: adembroski, BezO, dave374, Joborule, KANE699, LBzRule, rgiles36, and TheWatcher.
And just because it’s Monday, and many might be expecting some actual news on the game, we figured we’d be good bloggers and drop a new screenshot. Forgive our current lighting and skin tone tuning that is still in progress, but I thought you all would dig the new accessories.
Enjoy!
