NBA LIVE 16

LEAD ONLINE DESIGNER - PS4 / XB1

Online features took center stage in NBA LIVE 16 and I had the opportunity to spearhead the design around a new online co-op / competitive mode called Pro-Am which was used as a major marketing focal point for that year.

Pro-Am was often cited in reviews as one of the bright spots in NBA LIVE 16.

"Live Pro-Am is arguably the game changer for the franchise this year." - COGconnected

"The modes are engaging and enjoyable, especially so when playing with friends." - Sporting News

"Thankfully, the addition of the online Pro-Am and Summer Circuit at least gives NBA Live 16 a whiff of freshness." - GameSpot

Design Challenges

DESIGN CHALLENGES

LIVE Pro-Am

One of our key pillars for LIVE 16 was to create a new online street ball experience which we called LIVE Pro-Am. With co-op modes becoming more popular in other games, I decided to pitch, and ultimately designed, the idea to include both co-op and competitive experiences for this new mode. In order to keep our costs down, our Summer Circuit (co-op) and LIVE Run (competitive) modes shared a number of common elements like a street ball inspired rule set, lobbies and end game flow. The theme for each mode is what differentiated them with Summer Circuit having a more progression based approach while LIVE Run maintained its strictly competitive (5v5) feel.

Online Lobby UX

The Pro-Am lobby screen was one of our bigger challenges when designing this mode as it had to serve a number of different purposes. Since personalization of your created players was one of our pillars, we wanted to make sure users could show off their scanned heads and current street gear as well as see these features for other players in the lobby as well. We also needed to include the ability for users to drill down and retrieve info about other players in the lobby, upgrade their players whenever they wanted and provide appropriate funcitonality for different types of lobbies (public vs private).

Teammate Grading System

The main thing I wanted to make sure we encouraged in all Pro-Am games was teamwork. To that end, I developed a Teammate Grading system which evaluated users during the game and rewarded or penalized them for performing actions that were either beneficial or detrimental to the team. Whenever these events triggered, the user would see the scoring event appear above their player along with the impact to their percentile grade. Most events were displayed only to the user, but certain positive events that involved multiple players were communicated to everyone on the team as well as certain negative events (like Ball Hog) that we wanted to discourage users from doing.

Play Testing

Although play testing was part of our normal feature process, the gathering, analyzing and iterating on data for large online multi-player features was challenging to say the least. I worked closely with our UX Researcher to make sure we were testing the right things and asking the right questions in order to make the best use of our sessions. We tested everything including our front end UX, lobby UX, in-game UI (teammate grade, player indicators, etc.) and end game flow, which allowed us to fine tune the feature for the better.