Videos of Locomotion (Read 37 times)

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Hey everyone, my name is Ryan Burnsides and I am the Lead Gameplay Designer for Madden NFL 11. I normally like to stay behind the scenes, but since Ian coaxed me into writing this blog post, I figured I should write some sort of introduction. I am a huge football fan (college and pro) and an even bigger fan of football video games. I started at EA as an intern at the San Mateo studio (now in Redwood Shores) on the wildly successful Future Cop: LAPD (I'm sure you have all played it) and when given the chance to work at any EA Studio after my internship, the choice was an easy one. I wanted to work on Madden and joined the Madden 2000 team in mid-cycle. At various times over the last 11 years, I’ve been a lead software engineer on NCAA, Madden, and NFL Street, focusing mainly on AI, gameplay, and animation. From Madden NFL 07 through Madden NFL 10, I was the lead software engineer for our Central Gameplay Group. This year I have shifted more focus to the design side and I couldn't be happier in my new role. Now that you have suffered through that, I'll get to the good stuff.

Madden NFL 10 was a pretty dramatic departure from Madden NFL 09’s emphasis on twitch control. We really focused on trying to make the game look and feel more like what you see on Sundays. In the end we did a decent job, but we found out pretty quickly that the tech we were using wasn’t giving us the control that we needed to match our vision. Things like acceleration, direction changes, and momentum were very difficult to tune and while the end result was a fun user experience, we knew we had to make a pretty dramatic change in our tool set to allow us to achieve our goals.

At the start of the Madden NFL 11 cycle our goals were to integrate acceleration, momentum, and direction changes into the game in a way that felt responsive; was easy to tune; and looked more like what you see in an actual NFL game. With those targets in mind, we have completely ripped out our old locomotion engine and replaced it with a brand new system. We collaborated closely with the FIFA team and are combining the best parts of their locomotion system (called RailTracks) with a brand new tech we created specifically for Madden NFL 11. This new system has allowed us to meet our goals, and I’ll discuss how the tech affects the way the game looks and feels - focusing on momentum, acceleration, and the look on the field.

Momentum: In Madden NFL 10, players couldn’t turn as fast when they were sprinting as they could when they were not. One of the mechanics around this was forcing users to let go of the sprint button when they needed to make sharp turns (like trying to choose a run hole for example). This wasn’t very intuitive for a lot of our users. We knew that we had to make a change that would allow people to move where they wanted to on the field, while still making skills like Agility matter. We tried a few different things, but the mechanic that felt the best was to allow the player to go where you are pressing on the left stick, but slow him down to make the turn you are requesting (based on his ratings of course). It feels pretty natural to gradually round off a turn if you want to keep your speed up, or move the stick sharply to sacrifice speed for making a necessary cut. As soon as we put this in, the game felt way more responsive. You can feel the momentum of trying to turn a big lumbering lineman, but at no point do you feel like he isn’t going where you are trying to make him go.

If you try to make an extreme turn, your player will play a direction change that will dynamically update to match changes in desired movement direction. For instance, if you start a 180 degree direction change, but then change your mind in the middle, you can branch out. If you decide halfway through that you need to adjust where you want to run just a little bit, the animation will compensate and make sure you exit in the direction you are pressing on the stick. Direction changes have always been a tough balance between look and responsiveness, but our newtech has made it easier for us to improve both the look and feel of direction changes.

I’ve included a video showing how the agility rating affects a player’s speed through turns. I edited Wes Welker to give him 99 agility in the first part of the video. You can see him leaning through the tight turns, and slowing down to make them. After I run him around for a bit, I stop and edited his agility down to 50 (through a debugging tool running on my PC). Notice that he has to slow down more in the second set of turns he does. We still have fine tuning to do in how we map the agility rating to turn rates, but you can get an idea for how agility is going to affect gameplay in Madden NFL 11.

You can check out a lot more by clicking this maddennfl.easports.com/blog.action?blogId=locomotion here.