Madden NFL 11

ONLINE DESIGNER - PS3 / X360

When I transitioned over to the main Madden team (PS3/X360) for Madden 11, I was given the daunting task of designing a new online multiplayer team experience. Throughout the process I did a lot of gameplay, camera and UI prototyping followed by extensive playtests in an attempt to refine this new mode. In the end we managed to create a great feature that was embraced by fans and used as the basis for our Madden Bowl event for many years.

"I didn’t find enough added depth in Franchise and Superstar to keep me coming back. But Team Play, with its strategically different squads and accomplishments, offers a variety of experiences." - Destructoid

"There is one great addition, though, in the new Online Team Play...The mode puts a premium on teamwork, and players will likely enjoy this new version of online play much more than any of Madden's previous co-op modes." - Worthplaying

"...Online Team Play, now up to 3-on-3 -- is a blast, as long as you’re playing with friends." - Extreme Gamer

Design Challenges

DESIGN CHALLENGES

Online Team Play

On Madden 11, I was tasked with coming up with a way to make football into a viable online team mode. Since everything was being built from scratch, there were numerous decisions that needed to be made like how many players to include, what the UI/UX would be for organizing and playing games, how players would communicate, what compulsion loops to use, etc. Through prototyping and both internal and external playtesting we succeded in creating a new 3v3 mode where users controlled squads of players based around a group of positions and encouraged communication in order to work and succeed as a team.

Online Lobby UX

Setting up Team Play games required users to make a number of decisions. With that in mind, I wanted to make sure that these decisions were presented to users in a logical order along with any relevant details that could inform each decision. Our mode, like most sports games, also asked users to choose a unique role/position to play as on the team. In order to avoid the common "race for positions" situation, which I felt could create a negative experience for a user when they inevitably couldn't play as the position they wanted, we ended up creating an "ANY" position that allowed you to roam freely between squads. Lastly, I coordinated multiple playtests to make sure that people fully understood the lobby UX.

Protyping Gameplay

During the creation of our Online Team Play feature, the in-game camera system was one of the more difficult challenges to overcome. Traditionally, Madden was always played from the perspective of the Offense, or behind the QB. At the time I felt like that placed the Defense at a disadvantage, so I set out to prototype and playtest a number of different camera angles only to find that people were consistently split 50/50 on their preference. In the end we ended up erring on the side of a uniform camera perspective across the game in order to avoid confusion or a potentially jarring first experience.

Madden Demo

Towards the end of the project, I was asked to design and coordinate a team of various disciplines in creating the Madden NFL 11 Demo. We were challenged with finding a way to motivate users to share the demo with their friends in an effort to generate more visibility. To that end, we created what we hoped would be a viral social element that incentivized users to simply share the demo link with friends by rewarding them with in-game currency and increased the quality of the rewards whenever those friends would actually download and engage with the demo.