NCAA Football 12 / 13 / 14

Summary of Contributions

  • I led the design and feature planning for Road to Glory in NCAA 12/13/14.

  • I led the design and feature planning for Heisman Challenge in NCAA 13/14

  • I expanding RTG by introducing an expanded Senior Year Season by allowing the user to play 7-13 games while also letting the user play both sides of the ball

  • I designed and created a realistic Recruiting System for the High School portion of RTG

  • I designed and created the Coach Confidence feature which drove the depth chart and ability system in college.

  • I designed, created and populated an “Item Store” in RTG that served as the modes Attribute Progression system.

Road to Glory - High School

  • I wanted to re-do the mode by making it feel like a more authentic High School and College experience and over the years I added in a lot of features that really made the mode feel as immersive as possible. In undergrad I played football for Auburn University, so I had a lot of experience to grab and I truly hit the ground running. 

  • One of the most important parts I wanted to create was allowing the user to recreate their High School senior football season. So I added the ability to not only play 7-12 games, but you could customize your opponents name, stadium, uniforms and more.

  • I also added the ability for users to play “Iron Man”, which meant playing both offense and defense. At most middle school and high schools, players play on both sides of the ball - so this was a fun addition for realism

  • Another big addition that wasn't in the game was the recruiting system specifically for Road to Glory. When the user was creating the player they would put in a County and State, which we then took to create a Recruiting Radius for how they would be recruited during the season.

  • Since we already had a College Rating System (6 stars for the best schools and 1 start for the smaller school), the user would start to get recruited by smaller schools that were closer to them and then eventually bigger schools.

  • The user could then pick up to 5 schools to be recruited from and finally pick their next destination at the end of the season. 

Heisman Challenge

  • Road to Glory in NCAA 12 was an extremely popular mode. It surpassed the expectations of the leadership team, as they saw that 60% of users were playing the mode, compared to less than 20% in previous years.

  • As a result, I was tasked to create a version of Road to Glory, but the user would be playing as former Heisman Trophy Winners.

  • This was a departure from the user being able to customize their own player - so it needed to be different in a bigger way.

  • The very first thing I wanted to do was create a “slow-mo” feature that the player could use to slow down the game. When I was doing research on former college greats, they would always talk about how the game would slow down for them when they are in the heat of the moment.

  • We created the Reaction Time prototype in less than a day, as it was just slowing the game speed in half - but tuning it and polishing it took a bit more.

  • The result was fantastic - so much so that I also included it back in Road to Glory, but the user only had a limited amount of it to use and could earn it back by playing better.

  • I really wanted the Heisman Mode Players to really feel unstoppable, so for the first time in NCAA Football history, the attributes of player surpassed 99. For all player previously, they could never actually go above 99, because they were balanced properly - but these players surpassed 99, even though we didn’t show the number being above a 99.

  • Along with the gameplay features, we added in-depth bios for each Heisman Player and video interviews that talked about their Heisman winning season.

What I did: Was the lead designer on the Road to Glory and Heisman Challenge features. Planned and designed out all of the features for both modes, each year. Created multiple progression systems for each mode. Re-designed all of the customization features for Road to Glory. Built an item store for progression with 800+ items.

Studio: EA Sports Tiburon

Platforms: PS3, XBOX 360

Critical reception: 82, 76, 77 Metacritic Scores. Each title sold 2+ million copies

Team size: 200+

Project length: Each was 12 months

Engine and tools: In-house Engine, Adobe Suite, Confluence

Road to Glory - College

  • Once the user was in college, they just didn't get to automatically start like in previous game, they had to earn their way to #1 on the depth chart.

  • That's where Coach Trust came into play - which was an event-based system that graded the player on their performance in both practice and real games. Most users would enter their team at a 74-76 Overall Rating, while their teammates above them on the depth chart were a 80-99. So the user would have to go to practice and earn XP by doing "good things" like completing passes, scoring touchdowns and getting first downs.

  • The users could then go to the Item Store to buy items that would permanently move certain attributes up which would result in a higher Overall Rating. Once the user had earned enough Coach Trust, they could challenge the teammate to a position battle which winning would result in them taking that position on the depth chart.

  • When the user finally became the starter for their position, they had to keep their trust from the coach by continuously playing well, or their Coach Trust would drop low enough and they would have to enter a Position Battle to keep their starting role.

  • But the perks of being the starter weren't just being able to lead their team, they could also unlock new game mechanics like calling audibles and running a hurry-up offense. And of course, playing bad would result in the coach taking those abilities away.

  • Once the user had finished up their time in college, they could export their player to be played in Madden. I oversaw the attribution conversion of this feature and did some design work on the single player career mode in Madden as a result.