Hey Madden fans - just wanted to drop in with a bit of good news and show an upgrade that we've added to Madden NFL 10 - and that is the addition of the USAF Thunderbirds!
These elite pilots make a guest appearance in our Super Bowl and Conference Championship games, buzzing over the stadium at speeds exceeding 300 mph, leaving a nice trail of smoke in their wake:
It's actually kind of a funny story how these guys ended up in Madden.
We're still maintaining a bit of secrecy on many of our presentation upgrades so far this year, but I can mention that we spent a really large amount of time creating a new scripted scene "system" - in essence a better toolset for us to build things with. We were focused on really fixing up our processes and pipelines to make sure that it was extremely easy to add any kind of prop (i.e. a jet), animation (i.e. a player with his hand over his heart), character (i.e.a coach), and visual effect (i.e. smoke) into the game, without requiring the work of an engineer. In Madden's history, we have never had a real easy time adding things like trophies or fans without a lot of engineering work - after all, we couldn't even take the helmets off the players until this year. :) I'll make sure we do a whole blog on the bonuses of this system and what all it's gotten us sometime after E3 (when we're closer to done with all the stuff we're still working on), but this week it seemed fitting to talk about the genesis of the Thunderbirds pre-game flyover and how we were able to get it all added to Madden NFL 10.
The week of this year's Super Bowl (Cards/Steelers), a few of us were feeling a little dangerous and wanted to see what all our new scripted scene system could handle as it was still in it's early stages. With a little experimentation, we were able to get a rudimentary version of a flyover into the game, only we didn't have any plane models at the time. So we had to improvise...we could have done players, but that would have been boring...so we chose injury carts. :)
We also assigned them a little smoke effect that someone had already authored just to get the point across...check it out:
This got a lot of laughs around the office, but it also got a lot of people fired up to do it the right way. When you're working on a game with really tight deadlines, it is often quite tricky to add new things that were never planned for or scheduled. In this case though, immediately a ton of people volunteered their own personal time to make this flyover perfect and make it into a big moment - animators, audio engineers, audio artists, VFX artists, etc. We even went out and got a license for the final notes of the Star Spangled Banner to play before they cruised over.
Oddly enough, right when this prototype went in, some folks with the USAF Thunderbirds actually contacted John Madden himself at the Super Bowl and expressed interest in being in the game! John forwarded them over to us to see how feasible it would be, and obviously we were extremely psyched to be able to add that extra level of authenticity (instead of plain grey generic jets, or worse, injury carts.) :)
Our artists went to work on creating the custom paint job for the F16's that the Thunderbirds fly, and easily enough we were able to swap out our lowly injury carts with the real thing. Below are some close-up shots of the custom model that our artists worked so hard on:
So there you have it folks - a quick explanation of how the USAF Thunderbirds ended up in Madden NFL 10. Start getting your gameplan together - by August 14 you need to be ready to take your team to Super Bowl XLV in Miami so you can see them yourself.
- Ian Cummings
Lead Designer, Madden NFL 10